A DWELLER IN MESOPOTAMIA

Transcription

en
»*3"
; S2
\
V.
\
BT THE SA^ME AUTHOR
THE LAST CRUSADE
ADVENTURES WITH A
SKETCH BOOK
WITH BIBLE
AND
BRUSH
IN PALESTINE
\In preparation]
THE BODLEY HEAD
I,
A DWELLER IN
:: MESOPOTAMIA::
BEING THE ADVENTURES OF AN OFFICIAL ARTIST
IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
0
000
BY
WITH
DONALD
MAXWELL
SKETCHES IN COLOUR, MONOCHROME, AND LINE
I
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXXI
THE GOLDEN TOWERS
OF KHADAMAIN
TO
REAR-ADMIRAL E. C. VILLIERS, C.M.G.
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND.
PREFACE
F
EW adventurous incidents in our lives seem
romantic at the time of their happening, and
few places we visit are invested with that glamour
that haunt them in recollection or anticipation. I remem
ber comparing the colour scheme of a barge in Baghdad
with that of one in Rochester. It was a comparison most
unfavourable to Baghdad a thing the colour of ashes
with a thing of red and green and gold. Yet now that
I am back in Rochester, the romance lingers around
memories of dusty mahailas. It is easy to forget discom
fort and insects and feel a certain glamour coming back
to things which, at the time, represented the commonplaces
of life. There certainly is a glamour about Mesopotamia.
It is not so much the glamour of the present as of the
past.
To have travelled in the land where Sennacherib held
sway, to have walked upon the Sacred Way in Babylon, to
have stood in the great banquet hall of Belshazzar's palace
when the twilight is raising ghosts and when little imagi
nation would be required to see the fingers of a man's
hand come forth and write upon the plaster of the wall,
Vll
I
II
PREFACE
Vlll
to wander in the moonlight into narrow streets in Old
Baghdad, with its recollections of the Arabian Nights:
these things are to make enduring pictures in the Palace
of Memory, that ideal collection where only the good ones
are hung and all are on the line.
Although it was for the Imperial War Museum that
I went to Mesopotamia, these notes are not about the War,
but they are a series of impressions of Mesopotamia in
general. The technical side of my work I have omitted,
and any account of the campaign in this field I have left
to other hands. The sketches here collected might be
described as a bye-product of my mission in Mesopotamia;
but most of them are the property of the Imperial War
Museum, and it is by the courtesy of the Art Committee
of that body that I have now been able to reproduce them.
THE BEACON,
BORSTAL,
ROCHESTER.
June 12, 1920.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE FIERY FURNACE
.
II. THE VENICE OF THE EAST
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
SlNBAD THE SOLDIER
.
THE WISE MEN FROM THE WEST .
BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON
ARABIAN NIGHTS IN 1919
IN OLD BAGHDAD .
PARADISE LOST ......
THE DESERT OF THE FLAMING SWORD
THE KINGS OF THE EAST
I
15
27
37
49
67
89
97
109
119
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
XI
FACING PAGE
............ 112
SUNSET ON THE TIGRIS
.114
.
.
.
.
.
.
SHEIK SAAD AND THE PERSIAN MOUNTAINS .
. Il6
.
.
.
.
HIT, KNOWN TO THE ARABS AS THE MOUTH OF HELL .
A BRITISH CRUISER IN THE PERSIAN GULF ........ 122
LIST OF LINE SKETCHES
PLATES IN COLOUR AND MONOCHROME
THE GOLDEN TOWERS OF KHADAMAIN
......
Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
4
..........
ABADAN, PERSIA, THE OIL QUAYS
..... 12
H.M.S. MANTIS, ONE OF THE MONITORS ON THE TIGRIS
........... 18
HOSPITAL HULKS AT BASRA
.22
" THE SOLEMN PALMS WERE RANGED ABOVE, UNWOO'D OF SUMMER WIND " .
THE HOUSE OF SINBAD THE SAILOR, BASRA ........ 24
A BEND IN " THE NARROWS " OF THE TIGRIS ........ 30
.......... 34
A MARSH ARABS' REED VILLAGE
MUD HOUSES ON THE TIGRIS ........... 40
A MAHAILA OF THE INLAND WATER TRANSPORT ....... 42
EZRA'S TOMB ............... 44
......... 52
ON THE EUPHRATES, EARLY MORNING
........ 56
BABYLON, THE EXCAVATIONS AT EL-KASR
AN OLD WORLD CRAFT : A TYPE OF BOAT UNCHANGED SINCE THE DAYS OF
.............. 60
SINBAD
BELLAMS UNDER SAIL ............. 62
BABYLON THE GREAT is FALLEN, is FALLEN ........ 64
A STREET IN KHADAMAIN ............ 70
............ 72
MOONLIGHT, BAGHDAD.
A NOCTURNE OF BAGHDAD ............. 74
MAHAILA AND MARSH ARAB'S BELLAM ......... 80
A MOONLIGHT FANTASY: KUT, FROM THE RUINS OF THE LICQUORICE FACTORY. 94
DAWN AT AMARA .............. 100
A BACKWATER IN EDEN ............ 102
PUFFING BILLY ON THE TIGRIS ........... 106
ABADAN ................
2
.
"SERRIED RANKS OF TALL IRON FUNNELS"
.....
SHIP LOADING WITH OlL ......
"A MYSTERIOUS-LOOKING FURNACE TOWER" ........
" CRUDE STEAM ENGINES EVOLVED BY TITANS WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG "
IN ASHAR CREEK .............
SUNSET, OLD BASRA ...........
..............
DHOWS, BASRA
MONITOR " MOTH " AT BASRA ...........
THE SIRENS OF THE NARROWS ...........
NOAH'S ARK, 1919 ..............
.x
.........
UPWARD BOUND ON THE TIGRIS
HILLAH ................
CTESIPHON ...............
.......
ANCIENT IRRIGATION CHANNEL NEAR HILLAH
TOWER OF BABEL. FIG. i ............
THE TOWER OF BABEL .............
TOWER OF BABEL. FIG. 2 .........
TOWER OF BABEL. FIG. 3 ............
.............
GOUFAS ON THE TIGRIS
"A MAGIC VIGNETTE OF PALMS, EASTERN BUILDINGS, AND A LARGE SOUTH
WESTERN RAILWAY ENGINE" ..........
"SUDDENLY WE CAME UPON A SCENE OF STRANGE BEAUTY AND DRAMATIC
............
EFFECT"
6
"BY GARDEN PORCHES ON THE BRIM, THE COSTLY DOORS FLUNG OPEN WIDE"
.
7
9
ii
16
21
26
28
33
36
38
47
50
55
57
59
60
61
68
77
79
82
Xll
"ALL ROUND ABOUT THE FRAGRANT MARGE, FROM FLUTED VASE AND BRAZEN
URN, IN ORDER, EASTERN FLOWERS LARGE" .......
" BY BAGDAT'S SHRINES OF FRETTED GOLD, HIGH-WALLED GARDENS, GREEN
AND OLD" ..............
SHOWING THE SIMPLICITY OF MESOPOTAMIAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE. TIGRIS
...............
BAGHDAD
"PUFFING BILLY" IN BAGHDAD ...........
A BIT OF OLD BAGHDAD ............
" BLOSSOMS AND FRUIT AT ONCE OF GOLDEN HUE APPEARED, WITH GAY
ENAMELLED COLOURS MIXED" ..........
.
.
"HIGH, EMINENT, BLOOMING AMBROSIAL FRUIT OF VEGETABLE GOLD"
THE WALLS OF HIT .............
HIT ..................
...............
SAMBRA .
83
85
88
90
91
93
98
105
no
120
121
THE FIERY FURNACE
THE FIERY FURNACE
T
Abadan.
HERE is an unenviable competition between
places situated in the region of Mesopotamia and
the Persian Gulf as to which can be the hottest.
Abadan, the ever-growing oil port, which is in Persia and
on the starboard hand as you go up the Shatt-el-Arab, if
not actually the winner according to statistics, comes out
top in popular estimation. Its proximity to the scorching
desert, its choking dustiness and its depressing isolation,
are characteristics which it shares with countless other
places among these mud plains. But it can outdo them all
with its bleached and slime-stained ground in which nothing
4
can grow, its roaring furnaces and its all-pervading smell of
hot oil.
Across the broad waters of the Shatt-el-Arab there
stretches a lonely strip of country bounded by a wall of
palm-tops. Like all the land here it is cultivated as long
as it borders the river and thickly planted with date groves.
Then lies a nondescript belt that just divides the desert
from the sown, and then, a mile or so inland, scorched and
unprofitable wilderness.
Into this monotonous spiked sky-line the sun was wont
to cut his fiery way without much variety of effect every
evening, and night rushed down, bringing respite from this
heat; for it is happily one of the compensations of life in
these parts that the nights are cool, however hot the day.
About 150 miles from this busy spot lie the oilfields of
the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Two adventurous iron
pipes start courageously with crude oil and conduct it by or
through or over every obstacle from these wells to Abadan.
In the early days of the war great and successful efforts
were made to protect this line of supply, which was of vital
importance to the British Navy. The Turks lost Fao, the
fort that commanded the entrance to the Shatt-el-Arab,
within a few days of the opening of hostilities. They had
imagined it such a formidable obstacle to our approach that
they were thrown suddenly on their beam ends when we
took it. Consequently they could not keep us out of
Abadan, but fell back on Beit Naama vainly attempting
to block the river by sinking ships. One of the hulks,
ABADAN, PERSIA,
THE Oil. QUAYS
THE FIERY FURNACE
5
however, swung round and left a channel through which a
passage was simple. I once sketched some of these old
ships as they lay throughout the period of hostilities.
Since then they have been partially blown up. A divers'
boat was at work when I made my drawing and the first
charge was fired about three minutes after I had finished,
removing the funnel and one mast of the principal derelict.
Well, to begin my story.
It was evening. The sun was setting in the orthodox
manner described above. Abadan was looking very much
as usual. The smoke was smoking, the pumps were
pumping, the works were working, and all the oilers along
the quay, like all well-behaved oilers, were oiling.
As if to protest against the frankly commercial atmo
sphere of everything and everybody at Abadan, a dhow that
might have belonged to Sinbad the Sailor himself was
making slow headway before the failing breeze under a
huge spread of bellying canvas an apparition from another
age, relieved boldly against the dark hull of a tank
steamer.
The flood tide had spent itself and the river seemed
unusually still as twilight deepened and the many lights of
the works wriggled in long reflection in the water. A spell
of enchantment seemed to lie over everything, and the faint
purring hum from the distant oil blast furnaces pervaded
the still air. Old Sinbad came to anchor and night set in.
This is all very peaceful and picturesque to write about
now, but at the time I was in a motor boat that had left
I
Mahommerah to take me
for a run and it had
broken down and seemed
unlikely to start again in
spite of all the coxswain's
efforts. Consequently we
were drifting about on
the stream and likely to
be swept down by the
ebb tide. We were un
fortunately on the far
side of the river from
Abadan, and consequently
our plight would not be
observed from the works.
The situation was not a
pleasant one because we
"Serried ranks of tall iron funnels."
stood a very good chance
of being run down by some incoming steamer.
When it was clear that we should drift down below the
region of the oil quays I thought we would see what our
lungs could do. Timing our shouts together, the coxswain
and I, we sent up a tremendous hail to the lowest of the
piers. Again and again we startled the night, until at last
we heard an answering hallo.
In a few minutes a motor-boat bore down upon us. It
was the British Navy in the shape of an engineer lieutenant
commander. He took us in tow, carried me off to his
THE FIERY FURNACE
7
bungalow, arranged about the boat being berthed and
looked after till the morning, and proved a most cheery
soul full of good looks and given to hospitality. When I
explained my job he roared with laughter.
"Just the right time to arrive," he said. " Subject one,
Abadan at night complete with tanks; subject two, works,
oil, one in number sketched in triplicate why, my Lords
Commissioners will be awfully bucked. They've put a
couple of millions into this show, you know. Say 'when,' it
can't hurt you, special
Abadan brand."
I said "when."
I kept on saying
" when," and then as
a measure of selfprotection suggested
sketching the works
while I could distin
guish tanks from
palm trees. So we
went out and had
a preliminary look
round, reserving the
" Grand Tour of the
Inferno," as my host
named our projected
expedition,
until
after dinner.
'
8
; of oil refining.
t attempt t< qplain the
I am merely concerned in narrating what it looks like.
I know little beyond the fact that the crude oil arrives by
pipe from the oilfields by means of several pumping stations
and that it is cooked or distilled over furnaces and converted
into different grade oils from petrol to heavy fuel oil. As a
spectacle, however, I found a journey through this weird
region most fascinating and mysterious. At night it
appears as a vast plain gleaming with lights and studded
with dark objects, half seen and suggesting primitive
machinery of uncouth proportions. Huge lengths of pipes
creep from the shadows on one hand into the far-off regions
of blackness on the other.
Armed with an electric torch, which the Chief carried,
and a large sketchbook which I regretted taking almost as
soon as we started, we set out on our quest of Dantesque
scenery. At first our road ran along the quays by the river
side. A camouflaged Admiralty oiler \vas loading fuel oil
by means of three pipes that looked like the tentacles of an
octopus clutching on to the side of the ship. Near this
quay was a gate, and we entered the wire fence that
surrounds the works and the area of the tanks and struck
out over a dark waste.
The novice who roams about this place in the dark
spends a lot of time falling over pipes. They are stretching
all over the place without any method that is apparent.
The Chief showed up most of them with his torch, and so I
fell about only just enough to get used to the feel of the
I will
"A mysterious-looking furnace tower."
10
ground as a preliminary to what was coming later. It had
rained heavily two or three days before, consequently there
were lake districts, slimy reaches of mixed oil and mud and
dried, hard-looking islands that were in reality traps to the
unwary. The top only was firm, and it had the playful
property of sliding rapidly on the greasy substratum and
thus sitting you down without warning when you thought
you had reached dry land.
Had I known more about Abadan before I started I
would have taken a course of lessons in tight-rope walking,
for that seems to be a great asset in getting along. The
Chief was quite a Blondin. He could walk or run any
length of pipe and never swerve. Much practice had made
him an adept. There were places where the only alternative
to walking in mud and water was this balancing feat .along
the pipe lines.
When I had fallen several times and covered myself
with a mixture that looked like grey condensed milk mixed
with butter and felt like a poultice, I got my second wind.
I was still recognizable as a human being. All fear of
making myself in a worse mess had vanished, and thus,
freed from nervousness, I began to get quite daring. The
Chief saw in me the making of a first-class pipe walker,
and prophesied that I should be able to attain the speed of
three miles an hour. I still fell off, however, enough not to
get a swelled head on the subject.
After what to me seemed miles, and which as a matter
of fact must have been about five hundred yards, we
*•'.-•
I I 1
"Ci-ude steam engines evolved by Titans when the world was young."
I '
1,
12
emerged from 'the lake region and were able to find a
track along the ground. It skirted a railway line and led
toward some buildings and machinery. A dull glow began
to illuminate the scene and show up our path.
A building' loomed up against the sky. It was dimly
lit by firelight and suggested to me a glimpse of the Tower
of London with the corner turrets knocked off. In front
of this were some vast boilers with uncouth chimneys
stretching out of sight into the dark sky. The whole
thing, weird and eerie, was reflected in pools of water,
through which black figures toiled and splashed, pushing
some loaded trollies. Then we came out into a lighted
area at the foot of a mysterious-looking furnace tower,
where strangely clad men, not unlike tattered and disreput
able monks, were hauling at a great black object, some
boiler or piece of machinery.
The workmen on closer view showed that they were
dressed in sacking or some such rough material in a sort of
tunic. (They wore long curly hair and curious hats that
looked like Assyrian helmets.
" What race are these men ? " I asked the Chief.
" They are the Medes and Persians," he replied.
" And what is that tower? "
"Oh, that ," he paused for a few seconds, "that's
Nebuchadnezzar's Fiery Furnace heated seven times
hotter."
He was evidently determined to do me well from the
point of view of local colour and picturesque Biblical
-r-
ma
1 02
i aj
jl JTft
tIHE
^•^Jt3\m^
j^..__,.... _ 5
I
:/
*, . -f
H.M.S. MANTIS, ONE OF THK
MONITORS ON THE TIGRIS
THE FIERY FURNACE
association. I think, however, he missed a chance when
later on we saw mysterious writing in Arabic characters
upon the wall of an engine house. He should at least have
read it out as MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
Abadan is on an island and the pipe line crosses the
water from the mainland. We could see it stretching
away across the flat land into the darkness where the
sky-line of the palm belt by the waterside was just
visible. It is strange to reflect that all this scene of care
less activity is dependent on those two pipes, each about
14 inches in diameter, connecting it with a point 150 miles
away.
I came again in the morning to look at the works.
They did not appear half so mysterious as when seen in the
dark. The Tower of London had shrunk into quite a small
buttressed building of brick and Nebuchadnezzar's Fiery
Furnace dwindled considerably in size. The Medes and
Persians, on the other hand, looked wilder and more
" operatic " than at night. I think as a matter of fact they
were Kurds.
It is a very simple style of get-up to imitate. For
purposes of private theatricals I will tell you how to do it,
in case you should find the stage direction, " Alarums and
excursions. Enter the Medes and Persians"
Take a very tattered, colourless, and ill-fitting dressing
gown, without a girdle and flopping about untidily. Wear
long black curly hair to shoulder. Put plenty of grease on.
Then knock handle off a round-bottomed saucepan, very
I";
H
sooty, and place on your head. Dirty your face and you
might walk about Abadan without attracting notice.
I daresay if I knew something technical about the
refining of oil I should not find these works so fascinating.
There is always a glamour about a thing only half under
stood. Probably the retorts and boilers and all the
apparatus here are of the very latest pattern, yet so strangely
unlike modern machinery do they seem that I find myself
wondering if I have gone back into some previous age and
unearthed strange things of prehistoric antiquity. These
solemn-looking turbaned Indians might be tending the
first uncouth monsters of engineering the antediluvians of
machinery. These serried ranks of tall iron funnels, these
rude furnaces fed by crawling snakes of piping, these
roaring domes of fire might be crude steam engines evolved
by Titans when the world was young.
II
THE VENICE OF THE EAST,
I
1 'I
fflrfl^KL?^
-^-^~~^^.^ •%•
<
jg^" -g
-"
sT
.
I
THE VENICE OF THE EAST
B
In Ashar creek.
EFORE the war, when Mesopotamia was a more
distant land than it is to-day, Basra was often
referred to as the Venice of the East. Few
travellers were in a position to test the accuracy of the
comparison, and so it aroused little comment. No
Venetians had returned from Basra burning with indigna
tion and filled with a desire to get even with the writer
who first thought of the parallel, probably because no
Venetian had ever been there.
A few simple souls, who had delighted in the mediaeval
splendours of Venice, dreamed of a Venice still more
romantic a Venice with all her glories of art tinged with
c
I
pft
the glamour and witchery of the Arabian Nights, a Venice
whose blue waterways reflected stately palms and golden
minarets. Other souls, like myself, less simple and suffi
ciently salted to know that these Turnerian dreams are
generally the magical accidents of changing light and
seldom the result of any intrinsic interest in the places
themselves even they had a grievance when they saw the
real Basra. Was this the Venice of the East, this squalid
place beside soup-coloured waters ? Was this the city that
reveals the past splendours of Haroun Alraschid as Venice
reveals the golden age of Titian and the Doges ?
The first general impression of Basra is that of an
unending serious of quays along a river not unlike the
Thames at Tilbury. The British India boats and other
transports lying in the stream or berthed at the wharves
might be at Gravesend and the grey-painted County
Council " penny steamboats " at their moorings in the river
look very much as they looked in the reach below Charing
Cross Bridge.
Another thing which makes the contrast between Venice
and Basra rather a painful one is the complete and notice
able absence of anything of the slightest architectural
interest in this Eastern (alleged) counterpart of the Bride
of the Adriatic. Whereas in Venice the antiquarian can
revel in examples of many centuries of diverse domestic
architecture from ducal palace to humble fisherman's dwell
ing on an obscure " back street" canal, in Basra there
abounds a great deal of rickety rubbish that never had any
i8
HOSPITAL HULKS AT BASRA
19
interest in itself and which depends for its effect on the
flattering gilding of the sun and the intangible glamour
of Eastern twilight. In fact Basra might be described
from an architectural point of view as a great heap of
insanitary and ill-built rubbish which can look collectively
extraordinarily picturesque. I have seen bits on Ashar
Creek (as for instance the wooden old-tin-and-straw-matcovered buildings shown in the centre of the sketch in the
heading to this chapter) look most romantic and beautiful.
Yet they will not bear any close inspection, without
revealing themselves as monuments of slovenliness and
dirt.
In spite, however, of these drawbacks and disappoint
ments, to those who would find Venetian character by the
waters of Mesopotamia, there are two features in Basra
that do undoubtedly bring Venice to mind the boats and
the canals. The bellam is a long, flat-bottomed boat not
unlike a punt but narrowing at each end to a point, the
stem and stern-post alike ending in a high curved piece
suggestive of a gondola. These craft are propelled by two
men standing one at each end like gondoliers and punting
the boat along by poles. If the water is too deep to
bottom it they sit and propel the boat with paddles.
The canals of Basra are multitudinous. They are
artificially dug and are really more canals than creeks,
although they are always called creeks. Ashar Creek is
the most important of these waterways. It is generally
packed with craft from big mahailas, the type of vessel
M
i
20
shown in the sketch facing page 16, to the ubiquitous
bellam. Old Basra lies up here. As I approached it
one evening, with the sun going down, it looked most
gorgeous. Palms and gardens on the right and the build
ings of the town on the left, and boats approaching,
dream-like in the sunset glow. I have sketched the
effect roughly in the line drawing on page 21.
Some of the regions up these creeks are extremely
beautiful. For once there was nothing disappointing even
in comparison although comparisons, as we have seen,
are odious with Venetian waterways. For once we have
something that can surpass in beauty anything that Venice
can show. Basra can boast no architecture, but Nature,
coming to her assistance, can produce, between sunshine
and water, vistas of orange-laden trees overtopped with
palms and all reflected in the still canal. I have known
seven kinds of fruit to overhang the banks of one creek
at the same time.
I hired a bellam manned by two fearsome-looking
pirates and explored unending waterways in and around
Basra. The main thoroughfares run at right angles to
the river, but there are numerous narrow branches com
municating from one to the other, in some places forming
a network of little channels. Some of these were beautiful
beyond description. The tide is felt in all these waters,
and sometimes, during a spring tide, the effect of some
of these date palm plantations, with the ground just
covered, is strange. Hundreds of palms seem to be
Sunset, O ld Basra.
22
growing up out of a lake, and the glades reflected in the
still water is dream-like and enchanting, recalling Tennyson's
nocturne
" Until another night in night
I euter'd, from the clearer light,
Imbower'd vaults of piller'd palm."
The pirates were quite jolly fellows who pointed out
various things to me as being worthy^of interest. By this
time the natives have got up, in a most superficial way,
the things which they think will interest the Englishman.
Every group of palm trees more than twenty in number is
pointed out as the Garden of Eden, every bump of ground
more than six feet high is the mount ^ on which the Ark
rested, and every building more than fifty years old is
the one undoubted and authentic;residence of Sinbad the
Sailor. An old house in Mesopotamia in which Sinbad
the Sailor had not lived would be equivalent to one
of England's ancient country mansions in which Queen
Elizabeth had never slept. The fact] that Sinbad the
Sailor is a literary creation doesn't discourage the Arabs
in the least.
During this voyage of mine by bellam through the
multitudinous creeks of Basra a remarkable thing happened.
Under the circumstances it was a providential happening.
/ ran into Brown.
Now I do not expect the readers of some previous
notes of my sketching escapades* to believe this. It is
" . . . . THE SOLEMN PALMS WERE RANGED
ABOVE, UNWOO'D OF SUMMER WIND."_
Recollections of the A rnoian Nig/its
* "Adventures with a Sketch Book."
; f'
i
V
23
almost too wonderful that a chronicler of travels in
desperate need of some comic relief to save his book from
dulness would be so lucky as to pick up such excellent
copy as Brown, without previous intrigue. Nevertheless
I do solemnly state that I had not the slightest idea
where Brown was doing his bit in the war. I had last
heard of him in France in the Naval Division. That we
should both have travelled half across the world to meet
with a crash in a backwater at Basra was one of the
strangest freaks of fortune I have come across.
My two pirates were poling along quite merrily when
we took a right angle turn in fine style. It is evident
that the low foliage had hidden the side channel into
which we shot, and they had not seen what became evident
too late, a motor-boat at right angles across the creek,
apparently stuck fast.
I had just time to observe two naval officers and the
native coxswain struggling with poles to turn the boat
round, or free it from its unserviceable position with
regard to the bank when the prow of my bellam took a
flying leap over the motor-boat, precipitating my two
boatmen into the water, and sending me by means of
a somersault into the launch. Somewhat stunned I lay
gazing up at a piece of blue sky in which I could discern
the green leaves of palm trees.
'V
When in the midst of this blue dome above I beheld
Brown perched on the top of a palm tree exhibiting with a
look of blank astonishment on his face, waving an arm as if
1
•f:
24
in a kind of bewildered greeting, I gave up the struggle for
existence and became resigned to my fate. Without doubt
Brown, whom I had last heard of in France, had been
killed and was now doing his best to welcome me into
a happier and better world.
It would be quite like Brown to try and outdo the
ordinarily accepted symbolism of bearing a palm branch
by attempting to wave a whole palm tree, for this he
seemed most undoubtedly to be doing, embracing its trunk
and swaying from side to side.
Subsequently, when things had sorted themselves out
in my mind, and when I found I was still in the land of
the living I realized that he was attempting to descend to
earth. He was no less astonished than I.
After baling out the bellam and restoring order in the
launch we found that the casualties were nil, and proceeded
to compare notes. Brown, it appeared, had joined the
Naval Division, been to Antwerp, Gallipoli and France,
and then been transferred for gunnery duties to the rivers
of Mesopotamia, and was now Lieut. R.N.V.R. in the
Dalhousie stationed at Basra. His occupation, when I
came across him in this unexpected way, was that of a
leader of an expedition in a motor-boat with two R.N.
victims to find a new route to somewhere or other which
could not possibly be approached by water.
His enthusiasm had been so infectious that he had
persuaded these gallant and guileless officers to go with
him, and was, at the moment of my arrival, attempting to
I!
Hi
THE HOUSE OF SINBAD
THK SAILOR, BASRA
25
get a better geographical idea of the surrounding country
by climbing a palm tree and shouting directions to the
unfortunate occupants of the boat below, who were hope
lessly stuck. The sudden impact of the bellam, uncomfort
able as it was for all concerned, succeeded where they
had failed, in getting them off the mud.
An old-world touch is given to the waters of Basra by
the high-sterned dhows anchored in the river. Above Ashar
Creek the scenery of the banks with its wharves and big
steamers is not particularly characteristic of the East.
Some of it might be by the Thames at Tilbury Docks.
But by Khora Creek and in the lower reaches of the river
at Basra, these old-world ships, with their quaint lines and
steep, naked masts, are more in keeping with our recollec
tions of Sinbad the Sailor, or perhaps of the days of the
Merchant Venturers of our own Elizabethan days.
It is to be supposed that the type of ship that has
survived in the East to the present day, like the mahaila
and the goufa, is very much unchanged like everything else,
and tells us faithfully what sort of ships there were in these
waters some two thousand years ago or more. If this
surmise be a correct one, then we can trace the poop tower
of the Great Harry and the square windows and super
imposed galleries of the Victory's stern to this common
ancestor. I wish I had been able to get an elevation of
the details of one of these more ornate sterns. It would
be interesting to compare the work with that in the
ships of the Middle Ages and see if there is a definite
!f
I
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26
development of type from East to West via the Medi
terranean.
We passed down Ashar Creek just after sunset, and
the house of Sinbad, with its picturesque surroundings,
thoroughly looked the part. The tower of the mosque
stood out against a lemon-coloured sky, and wandering
wisps of purple smoke curled up from countless hearths.
Some giant mahailas, nearly obliterated the crooked
little galleries that overlook the creek, and a few boats
glided silently down towards the open river. Lights began
to appear and stars studded the darkening sky. Faint
sounds of chanting music floated across the water and
x
all the world was still.
III
SINBAD THE SOLDIER
,
*--~
."
- '->£•"
?••
" V£"""-'"'*'"V -•••*'••:-.'' -"*• - -•"
... • o : r ~—...-—- -- s'-'-
V1 .
SINBAD THE SOLDIER
Monitor "Moth" at Basra.
A
FTER a few days among the waterways of Meso
potamia one can get hardened against surprises.
The most amazing and outrageous types of craft
soon meet the eye as commonplaces of river life. Things
that would make a Thames waterman sign the pledge
proceed up and down without arousing any comment.
Noah's ark, with its full complement, could ply for hire
between Basra and Baghdad, and the lion's roaring would
at
be accepted as the necessary accompaniment of a somewh
old type of machinery resuscitated for the war.
I have seen boats jostling each other cheek by jowl that
s
might have been taking part in a pageant entitled " Ship
oats
in All the Ages." There were Thornycroft motor-b
and Sennacharib goufas, mahailas and Thames steam
d
boats, an oil-fuel gunboat and a stern paddler that coul
the
have come out of a woodcut of the first steamboat on
in
Clyde and all these in the same reach. I travelled
was
this last extraordinary vessel for a short time. She
t,
in charge of a sergeant of the Inland Water Transpor
my
with an Indian pilot and miscellaneous crew, and
of
adventurous cruise called to mind both the travels
Ulysses and the Hunting of the Snark.
t
The sergeant could not speak Hindustani and the pilo
most
could not speak a word of English. Mistakes of the
g
frantic nature were common, especially when we were bein
er.
whirled round and round by the stream at a difficult corn
of
In the midst of controversy unrelieved by any glimmer
ld
understanding on the part of anybody present we wou
p
slide gracefully into a state of rest on a mudbank or bum
easy
violently against the shore. Luckily, it seemed as
ly
to get off the mudbank as to get on it, and we final
of
got into positions we wanted to for making sketches
eant,
various points. The pantomimic violence of the serg
ately
together with diagrams in my sketch-book, were ultim
successful.
Nearly all the Tigris steamers proceeding up river have
30
i
}
•
A BEND IN "THE NARROWS"
OF THE TIGRIS
ii
SINBAD THE SOLDIER
i
_
loaded lighters on each side of them. Thes
e act as fenders
I at the corners and take the bump whenever the bank is
I encountered. The progress is slow and there is often a
good deal of waiting, for in the region between Ezra's
tomb (above Kurna) and Amara there is not room for two
steamers thus encumbered to pass with safety. These
waters are known as the Narrows. Signal stations are
placed at various intervals, and a signal is made to clear
the way, generally for the down-river boat, the up-river
craft, which, with the stream against them, will not have
to turn round in stopping, tying up to the bank. This
manoeuvre is done in a few minutes. The steamer that
is to stop runs alongside the bank and natives with stakes
jump out and drive them into the marsh ground. She
moors to these until the other vessel has passed downwards.
The sketch facing page 30 was done from a steamer
bound up-river, which had tied up under these conditions.
The paddler coming down has a lighter on each side of
her as the one sketched on page 38. She will come down
toward the leading marks shown on the right-hand side
of the picture, and then slide along the bank, using the
lighter on the port side as a fender. Then she will leave
the bank and shoot across to the other side of the river,
taking the next turn with her starboard lighter.
This drawing will serve to show the general nature of
most Mesopotamian river scenery, dead flat, with nothing
or little to relieve the monotony, a great expanse of muddy
waters and featureless dust, with just a suggestion in one
32
i
direction of a low line of blue very faint. It tells of the
far-away Persian mountains and of snow.
The great feature of the Narrows, however, and one
which all our dwellers in Mesopotamia will remember
vividly as long as they live, is the egg-sellers from the
Marsh Arab villages on the banks. Although a steamer
proceeding up-river may be kicking up a great fuss in the
water and apparently thumping along at a great rate, it is,
in reality, making only about four knots on the land.
Consequently, when it sidles into the bank, with one of
its lighters touching the marsh, the natives who are selling
things can keep up, and a running literally running fire
of bargaining is maintained between the ship's company
and the Arabs.
They are all women who do the selling weird figures
in black carrying baskets of eggs and occasionally chicken.
Gesticulating, shouting, shrieking, they rush along beside
the up-going steamer and keep even with it. In the
middle of a bargain the steamer may edge away until a
great gulf is fixed between the bargainers. Sometimes
it will slide along the other bank and a fresh company of
yelling Amazons will try and open up negotiations for eggs
while the frenzied and now almost demented sellers left
behind rend their clothes and shout imprecations at their
rivals. Another turn of the current, however, and the
vessel again nears the shore of the original runners and the
deal is finished.
One girl kept up for miles and at last sold her basket of
The Sirens of the Narrows.
D
I''*
• !M
34
eggs. She got a very good price for them, but apparently
she wanted her basket back again. The buyer insisted
that the basket was included, and the seller shrieked franti
cally that it was not. She kept up with us for some miles,
making imploring gestures, kneeling down with her arms
outstretched as though she was begging for her life, and
yelling at the top of her voice, tears streaming down her
cheeks. The basket would be worth twopence or less and
she had made many shillings on the deal. Finally, a
soldier good-naturedly threw it to her and it fell in the
water about three feet from the shore. She hurled herself
upon it waist deep in the water and seized it, then waved
her arms and leaped about in a dance of ecstatic triumph
that would have made her fortune at the Hippodrome.
Another feature of the Narrows is the reed villages.
This, of course, does not exclusively belong to this region,
but it is here, when tied up to the bank, that the best
opportunity of a close view is taken.
That houses can be built in practically no time and
out of almost anything has been abundantly claimed at
home by numerous enterprising firms by ocular demon
stration at the Building Trades and Ideal Home Exhi
bitions. Cement guns and climbing scaffolding, we are
assured, will raise crops of mansions at a prodigious pace,
and the housing problem is all but solved. If we have
not noticed many new houses it is not for want of inventors.
Yet the best of these efforts is elaborately cumbersome
compared with housing schemes on these flat lands bordering
1
A MARSH
A RAB-.
REEH VILLAGE
I
',!••
SINBAD THE SOLDIER
35
the Tigris and Euphrates. Not only has the Marsh
Arab evolved a style of dwelling that can be built in a
night, but he can boast of a device still more alluring in
its naivity and utility the Portable tillage !
I once made a sketch of a Marsh Arabs' village at
evening (reproduced facing p. 34), and on returning thither
on the following morning to verify certain details, I found
it had gone! I succeeded in tracking it down again by
the afternoon, about ten miles from its former situation,
and found the mayor (or whatever the Marsh-Mesopotamian
equivalent may be) inspecting the finishing touches being
made to the borough. Of course it is frightfully muddling,
all this moving about of villages, to the stranger who is
not keeping a sharp look-out and marking well such
impromptu geographical activity.
Along the shores of the rivers of Mesopotamia and in
the innumerable lagoons and backwaters that abound can
be found large areas of tall reeds, ranging from quite slight
rushes to canes twenty feet high. It is with such material
the Marsh Arab builds. The long rods he bends into
arches like croquet hoops. On this skeleton, not unlike
the ribs of a boat turned upside down, he stretches large
mats woven out of rushes. At the ends he builds up a
straight wall of reed straw bound up in flat sheaves. An
opening is left for an entrance, a mat, sometimes of coloured
material, doing duty for a door.
So much for the principal and removable part of the
village. However, the town planner will add to this by
li
36
\\
improvising mud enclosures for animals, and an occasional
wall and " tower." The mud is mixed with cut grass and
reeds, quickly drying into a hard substance, and sufficiently
permanent for anything that such a temporary village
requires.
In the bright sunlight of the Mesopotamian plains, and
probably also on account of their prominence at a distance
over the flat land, some of these mud buildings look quite
imposing. I remember once approaching a city with
ramparts, towers, and formidable walls which, on close
inspection, turned out to be a small mud enclosure of the
most decrepit kind.
Great changes have been made in the rule of the water
ways of Mesopotamia. Sinbad the Sailor has given place
to Sinbad the Soldier, the Inland Water Transport.
We have learnt, as we were advised to do in regard to
the things of Mesopotamia, to think amphibiously.
."VI ('
IV
THE WISE MEN FROM
THE WEST
i
I
K
THE WISE MEN FROM THE WEST
HE story of Mesopotamia is a story of irrigation.
" It is not improbable," writes Sir William
Willcocks, the great irrigationist, "that the
wisdom of ancient Chaldea had its foundations in the
necessity of a deep mastery of hydraulics and meteorology,
to enable the ancient settlers to turn what was partially a
desert and partially a swamp into fields of world-famed
fertility." The civilizations of Babylon and Assyria owed
their very life to the science of watering the land, and even
in the later times of Haroun Alraschid their great systems
had been well maintained. It is said of Maimun, the son
T
Upward bound on the Tigris.
and successor of this monarch, that he exclaimed, as he saw
Egypt spread out before him, " Cursed be Pharaoh who
said in his pride, ' Am I not Pharaoh, King of Egypt ?'
If he had seen Chaldea he would have said it with
humility."
Allowing for a certain amount of patriotic exaggera
tion, the exclamation at least shows at what a high degree
of excellence the irrigation system of Mesopotamia was
maintained in the loth century A.D. Yet Mesopotamia is
to-day a desert except for the regions in th'e immediate
vicinity of the rivers. You can go westwards from Bagh
dad to the Euphrates, and every mile or so you will have
to cross earthworks, not unlike irregular railway embank
ments, showing a vast system of irrigation channels both
great and small. But there is not a drop of water near and
not a tree and no sign of any life. How came the change
and how can such a network of channels have ceased to
work entirely ?
The reason is to be found in some past neglect of the
ancient dams that kept the water on a high level, so that it
could flow by means of artificial canals at a greater height
(and consequently at a slower rate) than the rivers them
selves. The Tigris and Euphrates are rivers fed by the
melting snow in the mountains of Armenia. The hotter
the season and the more necessary a plentiful supply of
water, the greater is the amount brought down. The
rivers, however, when they reach the flat alluvial plain
between the region round about Baghdad and the Persian
MUD HOUSES ON THE TIGRIS
41
Gulf, when left to themselves are always bringing down a
deposit and choking themselves up and then breaking out
in a new direction, causing swamps and turning much of
the land into useless marsh. Consequent also upon this
silting-up process the banks of the rivers are higher than
the surrounding country, and there is a gentle drop in the
level of the land as it recedes from the river.
The object of the ancient irrigationists was to tap the
rivers at the higher part of this plain, and then, by means of
great canals, lead the water where they wanted it. Large
reservoirs and lakes for storing surplus water were made,
and thus the uneven delivery of water by the rivers was
checked and a more regular and manageable supply
maintained.
The greatest of these ancient channels was the
Nahrwan. A regulator, the ruins which are still traceable
in the bed of the Tigris, turned sufficient water into this
high-level river at Dura. It stretched southwards for
about 250 miles along the left bank of the Tigris. It
was the neglect of this canal that led to a fearful catastrophe
which must have been responsible for the death of millions ;
a catastrophe which turned some 20,000 square miles of
fruitful land, teeming with populous cities, into a dismal
swamp.
The intake from the Tigris of this and other canals
evidently silted up, and thus enormous volumes of water,
usually carried off by them in times of flood, helped to
swell this river till, bursting its banks, it inundated the
:i
42
whole country. The result remains to-day a vast tract of
swampy land, barren and almost useless, except to a few
wandering tribes of Arabs.
And now the land which sent its Wise Men to the
West is looking towards the West again for aid. If its
ancient prosperity is to be restored, if Chaldea is again to
be a granary to the world, it is to the West that it must
turn. Science and machinery shall again make the waste
places to be inhabited and the desert blossom as the rose.
Thus shall the wise men return to them the Wise Men of
the West. In every important agricultural centre are to
be found irrigation officers the first-fruits of British
occupation.
There was only one subject of conversation in Mesopo
tamia in the winter of 1918-1919, and that was the chances
of getting back home. There was very little to do at
Basra except watch steamers load up with the more
fortunate candidates for demobilization and give them a
send-off. Brown had no difficulty in getting three weeks'
leave to accompany me in some of my expeditions to gather
up such fragments as remained of naval subjects on the
rivers. We determined on a voyage of discovery up the
Euphrates in search of the famous " fly-boats " which had
figured so vividly in the early days of naval river fighting,
and which now were more or less peacefully employed. I
had to make many sketches of them for further use, and
succeeded in finding a whole "bag" at Dhibban.
We embarked in an ancient-looking stern paddler
: I
A MAHAILA OF THE INLAND
WATER TRANSPORT
II
I
I
r>
43
named Shushan. As we had to camp out in a somewhat
rough-and-ready way, with not a little discomfort owing to
a spell of very cold weather, Brown insisted on referring to
her as Shushan the Palace.
She had a tall funnel, like the tug in Turner's Fighting
Temeraire, and kicked up a tremendous wash with her
paddle, the whole effect being faintly reminiscent of a hay
making machine. She pushed her way along, slightly
" down by the head," as if she had suddenly thought of
something and was putting on a spurt to make up for lost
time. I cannot lay hands on a sketch of her, but the one
reproduced at the head of this chapter will give some idea
of her character. Take away one funnel and place it amid
ships, reduce her tonnage a little, and you have the
Shushan to the life.
This gallant little curiosity is no late conscripted
product of the war. She is one of the pukka ships of the
Navy in Mesopotamia one of the Old Contemptibles.
Armed with a three-pounder which caused such havoc
to her decks when fired that it is reported the ship
had to be turned round after each round. Two shots in
succession in the same direction would have wrecked the
vessel.
A host of amusing stories of her exploits were told us
by her C.O., who was an R.N.V.R. Lieutenant. Some
practical joker produced a cylinder alleged to be in cunei
form writing. A translation of the inscription proved
beyond doubt that the Shushan was used by Nebuchadnezzar
li
f*
44
as a royal yacht, and is the last surviving link with the
Babylonian navy.
When the Turks had fled from Kurna and we were
chasing them up the river with an amazing medley of
craft, like a nightmare of Henley regatta suddenly mobi
lized, the Shtishan was in the forefront of the battle. Led
by the sloops Esfiiegle, Clio, and Odin, the Stunt Armada
came to Ezra's Tomb at twilight. The river was high and
the land in between the great bends was a maze of rushes
and lagoons. Hospital hulks like Noah's arks, little
steamers, and loaded mahailas jostled each other in their
endeavours to get up against the strong stream. The
hulks and the barges were dropped at the bend shown in
the sketch, facing page 46, and the Odin anchored. We
had captured already some Turkish barges, and prisoners
had to be collected.
The rest pushed on. Across the bend, some two or
three miles away, the Turkish gunboat Mannaris was
putting on every ounce of fuel she had, and a mass of
mahailas and tugs were doing their best to escape the
Nemesis that awaited them. Then the sloops opened fire,
and a desultory cannonade was kept up as it grew darker
and darker. At last it was too dark to get any sort of
aim, and firing ceased. The Mannaris had been set
alight by her crew, but we captured the whole of the
enemy's flotilla.
Ezra's Tomb is a splendid spot to look at. Mosquitoes
at times makes it far from pleasant to live in. The blue-
EZRAS TOM I!
45
tiled dome surrounded by palms, one of which is bending
down in a manner strange to such a straight-growing tree,
is an oasis in a vast wilderness of nothing in particular.
The Euphrates from a scenic point of view might be
Described as more wooded than the Tigris. There are
some delightful glimpses of waterside verdure and rushcovered shores. To the archaeologist and the historian
Mugheir is intensely interesting, for the great mound
discloses the site of the ancient Ur Ur of the Chaldees
from which Abraham set out towards Canaan.
Up till now, upon a map of the world in Abraham's
time, the good little Shushan would still be at sea. She
would be approaching the coast at the mouth of the river
Euphrates, the Tigris flowing out some fifty miles further
east. Dockyards and busy workshops would proclaim the
vicinity of this capital, the greatest of all the cities of
Chaldea.
Since these prosperous days the sea has receded about
150 miles, and left Ur a nondescript heap to be disputed
over by professors.
At length, when we :had said good-bye to the Shushan
and taken to a motor-boat, we arrived at Hillah, bent on
finding the house of the irrigation officer. We landed on
the wrong side of the river and rashly let the boat go back.
Brown maintains now that this was my idea, but as a
matter of fact it was one of his attempts at a picturesque
approach for my benefit. Brown has a vivid imagination,
and sees so clearly in his mind how a place ought to be that
J
> *\
f|
1
46
he really believes it is so. In this case he pictured us
approaching Hillah and looking down upon miles and
miles of fruitful gardens intersected with little waterways
a sort of landscape-garden Venice. This view could only
be obtained from a high cliff, and as there was no cliff in
lower Mesopotamia, except in Brown's imagination, it was
natural that he would be disappointed.
A sudden white fog, moreover, took away any chance of
a view of any kind, and we were soon hopelessly lost.
Some soldiers we met on the way told us to keep straight
on and then turn to the left by some palm trees. As we
soon encountered some palm trees every few yards we
wondered whether they intended to be humorous. I don't
think they did, however. The optimism of you-can'tpossibly-miss-it type is too general. The man who says
" turn down by some trees " knows the place well, and can
see certain trees in his mind's eye. He will turn when he
sees the right trees, but you will probably get lost.
Needless to say, everything went wrong with our
scheme of approaching the irrigation works from a pictu
resque angle. The dense fog thickened and shrouded the
neighbourhood of the river in impenetrable mystery. We
kept turning down by palm trees as directed, but to no
purpose. We struck the river bank again after much
wandering and kept to it, hoping the mist would clear. A
man in a goufa appeared from nowhere and floated away
out of sight into nowhere like a ghostly visitant from
another world. The sun began to show through the fog
and blue sky appeared overhead. Soon the steaming
vapours dispersed, showing a view of buildings among
palm trees and a bridge of boats.
Here again we were held up while countless mahailas
47
>'>•
Hillah.
I
passed through, but we succeeded in getting over at last
and eventually found the house of the Wise Men, the
headquarters of the irrigation officers.
Had we been ambassadors on a diplomatic visit to
Hillah, we could not have been more hospitably entertained
II
i
48
or given greater facilities for getting1 about in a most
fascinating region of the world for any one who felt the
glamour of history in this once highly civilized country.
Great buildings like Ctesiphon near Baghdad or traces
of the vast irrigation works of the past are full of interest,
but for romance and mystery there is no piece of the world
more fraught with meaning than this site of the city of
Nebuchadnezzar, nearly 200 square miles in extent, and
now, but for the comparatively small tract of irrigated land,
a desert.
" Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become
the habitation of devils."
V
i-l
GULF
E
V
,
}
•' I
rv-fli'
'if
HE irrigation officers at Hillah were ideal hosts,
not only from the commonly accepted standpoint,
but from that of an artist. They let me roam
about and sketch what / wanted, not what they wanted.
They gave me every means of transport, and such
suggestions as they made as to possible subjects were
excellent and offered with such tact that there was no
difficulty in abstaining from sketching or going on with
something else.
How often does the unfortunate painter suffer from the
well-meaning host, who with an admiration for his calling,
I
Ctesiphon.
1
I
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i
52
>
t
(
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(1
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III
Jj
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1
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. ill ',
il
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• ;
which is both extremely flattering and tremendously incon
venient, tries to do him well especially if he dabbles a
little in water-colour painting himself. An organized attack
on all the real or supposed picturesque bits in the neighbour
hood is planned and the members of his family outdo each
other in praiseworthy endeavours to help on the great cause
of Art. The campaign is prefaced by a violent discussion
at G.H.Q. as to the best landscape within easy reach, and
Millie, who has had lessons in pastelles, prevails over
Mollie, who merely does pen painting. The wretched
painter is then hauled triumphantly into a car surrounded
by the artistic, who regard him with almost heathen venera
tion and feel thrilled by the fact that they, too, observe that
the sky is blue and the trees are green. Arriving at the
chosen scene and viewing it from the spot " from which they
always take it," the unfortunate artist is stood or seated
down, book in hand, complete with paintbox and water, and
expected to begin. He does not have any voice in the
choosing of the view. It is high noon. The sun is right
in front of him and everything is so hard that even Turner
could make nothing of it. The worshippers at the shrine
of art stand' round in awed anticipation, waiting for the
masterpiece.
It is useless for him to protest that the conditions are
impossible. " After such kindness that would be a dismal
thing to do." So he contrives to make some sort of a
drawing which dims the lustre of his reputation in their
eyes for many years to come.
ON THE EUPHRATES,
EARLY MORNfNG
i vn <
I'if
53
^f The major took us in his car to various points along the
f river and explained the means employed in irrigation. On
the Euphrates there are two methods used for local irrigation
apart from the system of canals flowing from the river.
One is the water-wheel, a curious contrivance built out on
stone piers. It consists of a huge paddle-wheel with
buckets like those of a dredger, that fills a trough that runs
down into the fields.
The other is a water-raising device that is worked by
bullocks. A large leather skin is hauled up from the river
by a rope over a wheel. This rope is harnessed to a
bullock which walks backwards and forwards hauling up
the water-skin and letting it down again. When the full
skin reaches the top it hits against a bar and pours itself
out into a trough. These two systems, as can be easily
imagined, are good only for the land in the immediate
vicinity of the river bank, as the supply of water is
necessarily not large. Above Hit the frequency of the waterwheels with their stone piers causes so much obstruction
that navigation for any large boats is impossible. In one
place there are seven wheels abreast.
At last we arrived at an old bridge crossing one of the
ancient canals, which branched off from the river in a
westerly direction. I have sketched it on page 57. It is
extremely interesting as an example of the resuscitation of
the old waterways of Babylonia. The banks of this channel
here take almost a mountainous character for so flat a
I
country. This piling up of mounds has been caused by
'
I
I
F
I
54
11
clearing the silt from the entrance to the intake of the
canal.
From the vantage point of this high ground we could
see a goodly prospect, and on the one side the river, here
called the Hindeyeh canal, with its green shore and on the
other a belt of date palms and beyond the illimitable desert.
Some five or six miles away there appeared a mound
surmounted by a tower, a curious object alone in the great
expanse of flat land.
" What is that thing," I asked, " that looks like a ruined
castle on the Rhine ? "
" The Tower of Babel," replied the major, " or rather that
is its popular name. It is Birs Nimrud on the map."
Brown wanted to start straight away and " discover "it, but
we persuaded him to assent to lunch first. The major was
too busy for such an escapade, but he suggested lending us
a Ford car which would do anything with the desert and
which we could not break, so we returned to Hillah.
After lunch we set out on our expedition, Brown very
silent and full, no doubt, of romantic projects, and arrived
back again at the bridge where I made my sketch. It
appears that the route was not direct as far as the car was
concerned, owing to the crossing of some water channels,
but that on foot we should be able to do it. I knew Brown
was concocting something, and he soon let out what it was.
His scheme was to send the car round to meet us at the
Tower of Babel and we would walk. I think he rather
liked the idea of saying " Tower of Babel" to the driver
li
Ancient irrigation channel near Hillah.
'{
56
instead of " home." I consented, rather against my better
judgment, for I fear Brown's enthusiasm for dramatic
settings. His pathetic belief that my next picture for the
R.A. would be entitled " The Tower of Silence," and that I
should achieve a masterpiece in depicting the blood-red ruin
at sunset across the desert was somewhat disarming. He
forgot in his enthusiasm that if the sun didstt when we
were in the required position we should be benighted on the
plain without food or shelter, and not at all in the mood for
painting pictures.
Practical difficulties still existed, inasmuch as we were
for a long time unable to explain to the native driver that
he was to meet us at Birs Nimrud, and feared, if we
were not very explicit, he would return to Hillah and we
might never be heard of again. Brown's pantomimic
attempts at direction were obscure even to me, and I am
sure the driver thought he had gone out of his mind.
They consisted in his stooping down with his hand on the
ground, then rising slowly, turning round and round, his
hand describing a spiral curve, till it shot up straight
over his head. Then he pointed to the car. There was
evidently some implied connection between the spiral curve
and the car. How long this would have gone on I do not
know had I not tried the words "Birs Nimrud." The
driver understood this and I think we made it clear that
whatever happened he was to be at Birs Nimrud and wait
for us. So we started off on foot.
When we were well under way, I asked Brown, who
BABYLON : THE EXCAVATIONS
AT EL KASR
57
»
Tower of Babel (Fig. 1).
is a freemason, if he was endeavouring to reach the under
standing of the native by means of some mystic Eastern
ritual unknown to me. He was quite scornful of my
want of intelligence and explained that his movements were
intended to describe the tower that had been built from
earth to reach up into heaven. It was perfectly clear, he
maintained, that if he first indicated the Tower of Babel
and then the Ford car, the driver would see, had he been
reasonably intelligent, that he was to take the car to the
tower.
The journey over the plain towards the mound and
tower was not so eventful as we had expected it to be.
Beyond jumping many small watercourses or negotiating
muddy patches left by the recent rain, we found no diffi
culty in keeping a straight course. A herd of camels
58
trotted away as we approached and we started up a fox.
Otherwise we came across no sign of life. As we advanced
mile upon mile the mysterious tower seemed to get further
away, an illusion possible in flat countries. I have often
observed a similar phenomenon in Holland. Perhaps in
this case mirage had something to do with it.
A mosque or tomb became visible and then, almost
suddenly, we seemed to get to close quarters with every
thing. A ridge rose up from the flat land and from this
point of vantage, known as the tomb of Abraham, we could
look across a level zone a few hundred yards wide to the
long, irregular hummock about a hundred feet high,
although in this setting it looked a great deal more. The
east side of this small range is scored with miniature
wadies washed out by rain, and the crowning ruin appeared
(as in sketch, Fig. i), casting a long shadow down the
slope of the hill.
Leaving the high ground we skirted the foot of the
mound, going southwards and seeing it from the point
of view indicated in Fig. 2, and then as at Fig. 3. A
group of Arabs bargaining about coins and attempting to
sell curios to two British officers, who had dismounted
from their horses, made a tremendous hubbub and, as
Brown noted, gave the right local colour as to the confusion
of tongues.
I am ill-equipped with books of reference out here,
but in one of Murray's handbooks I have unearthed the
following note all I can find about this place :
h*
The Tower of Babel.
60
"Bms NIMRUD, about
2j hours from Hillah, is a
vast ruin crowned appa
rently by the ruins of a
tower rising to a height of
153^ ft. above the plain,
and having a circumfer
ence of rather more than
Birs,
The
2000 feet.
which was situated within
the city of Borsippa, has
been wrongly identified
Tower of Babel (Fig. 21.
with the Tower of Babel.
It?is the temple of Nebo, called the ' Temple of the seven
spheres of Heaven and Earth,' and was a sort of pyramid
built fin seven stages, the stairs being ornamented with
the planetary colours, and on the seventh was an ark or
tabernacle. The Birs was destroyed by Xerxes and re
stored by Antiochus Soter. The Tower of Babel was
possibly the Esagila of the inscriptions, or the E-Temenanki
a tower not yet identified. Not far from Birs Nimrud
are the ruins of Hashemieh, the first residence of the
Abbaside Khalifs."
Brown would have none of this. Anything is anathema
to Brown which destroys topographical romance. He is
a fierce enemy to " higher criticism," which does away with
the whale in the book of Jonah or the snow-clad summit
of Mount Ararat as the resting-place of the ark. It is
ril
AN OLD WORLD CRAFT, A TYPE OF BOAT
UNCHANGED SINCE THE DAYS OF SINBAD
('I
61
quite exciting, he maintains,
to picture the ark stuck on
the perilous ice-peaks of a
glacier, with Noah and his
family endeavouring to get
the elephants and giraffes
safely down a ravine like
the Mer de Glace to the
Tower of Babel (Fig. 3).
more temperate regions of
the plains below. How much better than thinking of it
stuck fast on some wretched mound by the Euphrates,
30 feet high.
Here was a find, too good to be lost, a high tower on
a mound visible from afar and unrivalled by any equally
picturesque claimant. It looked the part splendidly, so
the Tower of Babel it should be as far as Brown was
concerned.
As a matter of fact, Brown " let himself go" with
historical speculations and discovered not only that this
was the Tower of Babel, but that it was the site of
Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace, with evident signs, from
a fragment of calcined brick, which he bore away in
triumph, that it had been heated seven times hotter on
some occasion.
We climbed about the ruin, unearthed several coins,
which seemed quite plentiful in one place where the rain
had washed down the side of a small mound, and found
obvious signs of some great conflagration. Brown says
62
that, as no one has got any better explanation of this fire
than he has, he will stick to his furnace theory.
The native driver turned up all right with the car
and took us back to Hillah. From there we crossed the
river by the bridge of boats and at a distance of about five
miles came upon the scene of the great excavations, which,
although the city is said to have extended over an area
of some 200 square miles, is generally known as the site
of Babylon. It was in 1899, that the German archaeologist,
Dr. Koldeway, began excavations on a large scale and with
systematic care.
Although Babylon was a site occupied by some city in
prehistoric times, as stone and flint implements denote, the
earliest houses of which there are any traces belong to
about 2000 B.C. It was Nebuchadnezzar, however (605562 B.C.), who rebuilt the city and made it very splendid,
and it is to this period of his reign that the greater part
of the ruins of the great city belong. The mound Babil
is thought to be the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II. An
inscription reads: " On the brick wall towards the north
my heart inspired me to build a palace for the protecting
of Babylon. I built there, a palace, like the palace of
Babylon, of brick and bitumen."
The principal excavations are in the Kasr, at one time
a vast block of buildings where are still the traces of a
great and broad street used as a processional road to the
temple of E-Sagila, which lies to the south about 700 yards
away. Some of the stones of this road are in their original
BELLAMS UNDER SAIL
i f
'
Jaces, and there are pieces of brick pavement, each bearing
uneiform characters. If you take up a brick and look at
t casually, you might think that it had " Jones & Co." or
the " Sittingbourne Brick Co." stamped upon it and it
.does not look at all old. It is rather startling to be told
(that the letters read :
" I am Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon ; I paved the
I Babel Way with blocks of shadu stone for the procession
[of the great lord Marduk. O Marduk, Lord, grant long
llife."
These mounds of the Kasr have suffered by successive
[generations of brick getters. Half Hillah is said to be
jbuilt out of bricks from the ruins of Babylon, and bricks
fare still taken for any building operations that occur within
jeasy access of these well-nigh inexhaustible supplies. In
lone place, the Temple of Nin-Makh, the Great Mistress,
[there are to be found an immense number of little clay
images, thought to be votive offerings made by women to
[the great Mother Goddess.
In the Mound of Amram, according to Major R.
[Campbell Thompson, are traces of the E-Temenanki
^referred to in Murray's handbook as not yet identified.
[My Murray's handbook is 15 years old.] He writes, in
a most useful little book published in Baghdad, 1918,
" History and Antiquities of Mesopotamia " : " A hundred
yards north of the north slope of Amram is the ancient
zigurrat or temple-tower of the famous E-Temenanki:
' the foundation stone of Heaven and Earth ' (the Tower
1 -it
ost a square,
of Babylon). The enclosing wall forms alm
buildings have
and part has been excavated, but all the
of the actual
suffered from brick-robbers. The remains
Tower are towards the south-west corner.
out here.
" Many ancient restorations were carried
rhaddon and
Professor Koldeway found inscriptions of Esa
of Babylonian
Sardanapalus and thereafter inscriptions
buildings 'the
Kings. Herodotus calls the group of
he describes
brazen-doored sanctuary of Zeus Below,' and
stages. The
the zigurrat as a temple-tower in eight
how the god
cuneiform records of Nabopolassar relate
ndation of the
Marduk commanded him 'to lay the fou
of the under
Tower of Babylon . . . firm on the bosom
ds.1 "
world while its top should stretch heavenwar
of a shelled
The first impression of the Kafr is that
ains but the
town or mined flour mill, where nothing rem
point of view,
lower walls of buildings. From a painter's
has pictured so
the scene of this great city, about which he
re is such an
much, is somewhat disappointing. The
and streets.
absence of anything suggestive of palaces
Frindsbury are,
Frankly, the ruins of the cement works at
ays said that
pictorially, far more suggestive. I have alw
spots off the
the hanging gardens of Borstal knocked
w it. So much
hanging gardens of Babylon, and now I kno
for a first impression.
these hum
After awhile, however, wandering amongst
gestion of a
mocks and pits, with here and there a sug
ins to return.
gateway or pavement, the glamour of it all beg
64
1
BABYLON THE GREAT
IS FALLEN, IS FALLEN
i
)
?; f I
65
It is not to the eye that the appeal of poetry is made, but
to the imagination.
There is a figure of a stone lion trampling on a man,
but this was unearthed and set up by a French engineer,
and is not explanatory of any scheme of sculptural work.
It is merely a monument. There is also a brick pillar,
the bricks being uncommonly like London stock bricks,
which might be part of a fallen chimney in a ruined
factory. These are the only architectural signs at first
visible.
On descending to the passages and ways made by the
base walls of buildings, lions and monsters moulded in
the brickwork appear, but they are only to be seen at
close quarters, and in one part of this vast wilder
ness of brick, and do not affect in any way the general
character of the place a place of loneliness and of utter
desolation. The whole area is like a small range of hills,
down the slopes of which are steep descents to clefts some
times filled with reeds and rushes and stagnant pools
of water. The site of the world-renowned hanging gardens
is now marked by a series of nondescript lumps. The
great temple of Marduk is a dusty heap of brick rubbish,
and the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar appears as a mean slag
heap looking down upon a land desolate and empty.
This is Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty
of the Chaldees.
" It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt
in from generation to generation ; neither shall the Arabian
it;
r
I ,.!
•fi<i
J' i i r
66
pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their
fold there.
" But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their
houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall
dwell there and satyrs shall dance there.
"And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their
desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces."
VI
h
OMEWHERE in Mesopotamia, in the desert country
that lies between the Euphrates at Felujeh and the
Tigris, and in the neighbourhood of a walled-in
group of buildings known as Khan Nuqtah, in the month
of February of this year, and on a singularly miserable and
rainy afternoon, there might have been seen a dark object
moving very slowly across the uninteresting field of vision.
At a distance it would not have been very easy to make out
the nature of the thing, and a newcomer to the scene, with
no local knowledge of circumstantial evidence to guide him,
would have hesitated between a buffalo or a hippopotamus
S
70
and finally given a vote in favour of it being some slimecrawling saurian that we come across in pictures of ante
diluvian natural history.
A closer view, however, would have made clear to him
that it was no animal, but some species of tank, coated and
covered with mud, accompanied by three similarly encased
attendants, probably human beings, staggering and skidding
about in its immediate vicinity. From time to time, one of
these three would mount on the head or fore-part of this
object, with the effect of causing it to slide and plunge
forward for a few yards to stick again and again, snorting
and panting and unable apparently to make any further
progress.
A detective, equipped with a certain amount of motor
knowledge, might have been able to discern that the mudencrusted monster was a Ford car. A tailor, whose technical
training would help him to penetrate the disguise of thick
slime, might have been able to recognize by the cut of their
clothes that the first of the three figures was an R.A.F.
driver and the other two were naval officers. As a matter
of fact one of these forlorn representatives of our boasted
sea-power was Brown, and the other one, although I think
he would have hesitated to swear to his identity at the time,
was the unfortunate writer of these chronicles.
There was no doubt about it; we were done.
" At the present rate of progress we shall reach Baghdad
in about ten days," said the driver, "and it's getting
worse."
A STREET IN KHADAMAJN
r,.
i.
71
A few more hours' rain and no power on earth would
move the car an inch. We knew from experience that
nothing could be done for four or five days, so we faced the
situation philosophically, shouldered a bag each and
staggered in the sliding mud in the direction of the Khan.
We started off with no illusions as to our fate if we
encountered rain, and were therefore quite prepared for this.
There was nothing for it but to camp out somehow until
the sun had been given a chance. The fact that we had
been able to reach this point with the Khan and railway
close at hand was a piece of luck for which we were
thankful.
Brown was by far the best exponent of this art of walk
ing in mud while carrying weight. The driver was quite
good at it, having had considerable practice on similar
occasions. I was uncompromisingly bad. I sat down three
or four times to the driver's once. Brown did not sit down
at all, but he did some amazing movements in skidding,
reminding one in a somewhat vague way of the tramp
cyclist of the music-hall stage.
I have often thought since these days of mud in
Mesopotamia that a vast fortune might be made by some
one who could find a commercial use for a substance, as
slippery as oil, as indelible in staining properties as walnut
juice, and as adhesive as fish glue. Large quantities of
Mesopotamian mud could be shipped to London and made
up into tubes. Then all that would be necessary would be
three distinctive labels. One could describe it as a wonderful
I i
72
lubricant and cheap substitute for machine oil. Another
could proclaim to the world a new washable distemper. A
third could laud it as a marvellous paste or cement that
would adhere to anything whatsoever.
" There is one comfort," Brown gasped in an interval
between two very energetic spells of sliding, " if we can't
move the Ford, nobody else can ! "
In the circumstances of the moment I cannot say that
I felt much " comfort" in contemplating the car's condition.
In fact I didn't care in the least whether I saw the thing
again or not. All I cared about was reaching the Khan
and putting down my bag. We found tracks where some
scrubby plants were growing, where the surface was
passable, but as we neared the entrance to the Khan, where
carts and horsemen had made a veritable quagmire, we
stuck, all three, without apparently any prospect of getting
on at all unless we abandoned our baggage. However, some
Arabs came to our assistance and relieved us of our burdens,
so that we gained our objective.
Beginning our toilet by scraping each other down with
a ruler, so that we could see which was which, we soon
evolved into something like our normal selves. We had
a few clothes to change into, but neither Brown nor I had
a complete set of everything. The result was that Brown
looked like a naval officer that had taken up cement making
and I appeared to be a cement worker, finished off, as the
eye followed me downwards, with very smart trousers and
regulation naval boots.
MOONLIGHT, BAGHDAD
73
The Khan was a poor enough shelter as far as accommo
dation went, but we managed to make up a good fire and
get tolerably dry. Some tea, made by the ever resourceful
driver, raised our spirits considerably, and we talked over
plans for the immediate future. Enquiries revealed the fact
that we were in great luck about trains, which appeared at
intervals of several days, as one was due in a few hours that
would reach Baghdad the same night. The driver had
found others held up with their cars, so we left him to stand
by till better weather made movement possible and decided
to put in a few days at Baghdad instead of waiting here.
At about 7 o'clock, a train of miscellaneous construction
steamed in from the direction of Dhibban, bound for
Baghdad. This bit of line runs from Baghdad to the
Euphrates and is important because it links up the two
great waterways and is always available when motor trans
port is impossible on account of the state of the roads.
We clambered into a covered van, specially reserved a
sort of Mesopotamian Pullman car. It contained a great
litter of odd baggage and two Hindu officers who were
very luxuriously fitted up with beds and a table. Divesting
ourselves of our wet trench-coats, for it was still raining, we
made some sort of a seat of our bags and were tolerably
comfortable. Brown, who, now that he was dry and warm
I and well fed, was in the highest spirits, prophesied that our
arrival in the enchanted city of the Arabian Nights was
well timed, for it was Friday night, when all the mosques
would be lighted up.
:
f -
74
" A million tapers flaring bright
From twisted silvers look'd to shame
The hollow-vaulted dark, and stream'd
Upon the mooned domes aloof
In inmost Bagdat, till there seem'd
Hundreds of crescents on the roof
Of night new-risen." *
So sang Brown, with a map spread out, proving to me
that we must alight at Baghdad South to get the best effect
as we gazed entranced at the night glory of Bagdat's shrines
of fretted gold and walked on to find romance and mystery
by many a shadow-chequer'd lawn.
" So much better," he argued, " to approach it gradually
like this instead of arriving in a matter-of-fact way by train."
It was still raining hard, and I had grave doubts about the
splendour we were enjoying so much in anticipation, but I
did not throw all cold water on his scheme, especially as
much of it was planned for my benefit. Art would be the
richer, although we, its humble devotees, might be the
wetter.
I forget now, very clearly what did happen when we
arrived at Baghdad South, because we had stopped some
time, shunting about, and did not know that we were there.
When at last we discovered that we were at the station the
train was just moving off. Brown shouted to me to jump
out and take our bags. I did so as best I could, but found
myself up to my ankles in liquid mud, not a good position
at any time for catching heavy baggage at a height, but
* Tennyson : " Recollections of the Arabian Nights."
A NOCTURNE OF BAGHDAD
I'l!
75
singularly awkward in view of the fact that Brown in the
dark could not see where I was and hurled the bags just
out of reach, but sufficiently near to me to cover me with a
kind of soup.
My next recollection is that of Brown, dark against the
sky, describing a parabolic curve and alighting further up
the line. The train had gone, and a sloppy gurgling noise
mingled with muffled exclamations growing more distinct
indicated that Brown was endeavouring to walk in my
direction. These were the only sounds that interrupted the
steady noise of pouring rain. There was nothing in sight.
'Not only was it that we could not see the splendour of
Baghdad ; we could not see each other.
After an interval of groping about and finding bearings,
we began to get accustomed to the gloom and discerned
some sheds or buildings up the line. Thinking this was
the station we plodded on as steadily as possible through
the mud. Dimly, through the rain, we could make out some
palms and what appeared to be a domed building and a
minaret. Then we reached a large wooden shed out of the
shadow of which loomed an engine. It evidently had steam
up, so we stopped and gave it a hail.
I think I shall never forget the surprise of the next few
minutes. As if in answer to our hail, a door opened in the
dark mass of the shed and revealed a workshop brilliantly
lighted. Out of this stepped an Arab with a lamp in his
hand, and gave us an answering shout. We stepped into
the light. I don't know which was most surprised, the
1
76
native at seeing such curious figures staggering under large
bags through the mud, or we, at beholding in the beam of
light from the shed a magic vignette of palms, Eastern
buildings and a large South Western Railway engine.
Brown was delighted.
" The slave of the lamp," he cried, " calling up spirits
from the vasty mud. I don't believe this engine is real, but
it will do to get us into Baghdad."
And it did. We found a soldier driver and a stoker,
got leave from headquarters to use the engine to run into
Baghdad West, hurled our bags on to the coal in the
tender and were transported unscathed by further mud to
the quay by the waters of the Tigris. It was too dark to
see much. A multitude of steamboats and mahailas lined
the shore. The river was in flood and looked black and
forbidding, and it was impossible to see across to the other
side. The only light was supplied by a few electric lamps
at intervals along the road. It still rained dismally and
we made for a canteen close at hand. Here we felt quite
at home, for there were several other arrivals as muddy
as we were and even worse. Considering this was only
a restaurant attached to a rest camp, we fared very well.
Our baggage we left there and set out on foot to try and
reach Navy House, which was the other side of the river.
There were two boat-bridges we were told, and the upper
one would lead us into the right quarter. The old Navy
House, near to G.H.Q., was now used by some one else,
and the British Navy, shrunk to very small proportions
"A magic vignette of palms. Eastern buildings and a large
South Western Railway engine."
78
as far as Baghdad was concerned, " carried on " in a back
street.
Our first check was at the bridge. Owing to the river
being in flood, it was open, that is, the middle section had
been floated out, for fear that the hawsers would not stand
the strain and the only road across was the Maude Bridge
lower down.
Brown was delighted. The rain had stopped and he
anticipated adventure. The idea of getting across the river
in a goufa flashed across his mind, but a glance at the
foaming, tearing water was sufficient deterrent even to an
optimist like Brown. It might be done in daylight, but
at night it would be suicide.
We decided to make our way through the narrow
streets that led by the side of the river until we struck the
main road that approached the bridge of boats half a mile
or so down. In theory this sounded very feasible, but in
practice, owing to the tortuous nature of the ways and to
the fact that it was very dark, we soon got lost. Twice,
when we thought we were progressing well, we came upon
the same place again. Then we struck the river, more or
less by accident, and took fresh bearings of the general
direction we were to pursue.
We plunged into a covered way, arched overhead like
a cloister. This had the advantage of being dry and our
speed increased considerably. From time to time a dim
light gave a glimmer to show us the way.
It was late and there were few people about. The
" Suddenly we came upon a scene of strange beauty
and dramatic effect."
8o
figures that flitted by were silent and mysterious. A
window here and there was lighted up, but for the most
part the houses were dark and without sign of life. We
found no " splendours of the golden prime of good
Haroun Alraschid," but for all that the narrow streets
looked romantic and weird. The sky had cleared and
the moonlight had given a glamour of phantasy to the
vistas of the street.
Suddenly we came upon a scene of strange beauty
and dramatic effect. A turn in this narrow and cloisterlike way brought us to an arched opening, with some
steps leading to the water. It was a sheltered inlet from
the surging and swirling stream of the Tigris, a kind
of pocket built round by crazy old balconied buildings.
This was filled with goufas, the weird round boat of the
upper river, and the animated scene of people either
embarking or disembarking made a strange people. We
saw this scene for a few moments only, as we made our
way through the crowd at this point. I have since
wondered where all these goufas were going. They could
not have intended to cross the river under present con
ditions. I think the rapidly rising river must have upset
all calculations as to mooring boats at this point and
their owners were making sure that they were secure.
The noise and apparent excitement was probably nothing
but the usual Eastern custom of making a great fuss
about nothing.
At last, after much marching and counter-marching,
MAHAILAS AND MARSH
ARABS BKLLAM
81
we struck the main thoroughfare leading to the Maude
bridge, which we crossed. The thick, seething waters
foamed and struggled against the pontoons and swept
down between them like roaring devils. We were
very glad to get over, for it looked as though a little
more force would have carried the whole thing away.
Once clear of the bridge we found ourselves in New
Street, the thoroughfare made since the British occupa
tion, and incidentally we ran into a cheery naval officer
who picked us up and deposited us again at Navy
House, whither he was bound. Had we not received this
timely aid I think we should have gone on looking for
Navy House all night. A more amazing situation for
it could not have been found, if you searched the world
over.
Wedged in, cheek by jowl, with buildings that might
have figured in the tall streets of old London, it lay
nowhere near the water, down a very narrow and crooked
lane, where mules and men, camels and beggars jostled
each other on their lawful occasions.
When we had settled down there and had fine weather
for several days, Brown, loath to waste the romance of old
Baghdad during glorious moonlight nights, insisted on
some mysterious expeditions which were for the purpose
of adventure, but ostensibly arranged to give me an oppor
tunity of sketching. He produced an Arab, arrayed in
strange garments, to carry a light and generally act as a
guide. We called him the slave of the lamp. I am
t
Jl 1
I
'By garden porches on the brim,
The c osily doors flung open wide."
"All round about the fragrant marge,
From fluted vase and brazen urn,
In order, Eastern flowers large."
I
84
quite certain that he thought Brown was mad, but this
belief on the whole was rather an advantage, as he
treated him with all the more respect because of his
affliction, which he regarded as a special visitation of
Allah.
I was surprised that he seemed to take great delight
in my sketching, and several times, when I was making
notes of some quaint latticed windows overhanging the
narrow road, so that they nearly met, he became quite
excited, chuckling and laughing to himself, as if in the
enjoyment of some tremendous joke.
I discovered afterwards that Brown's native servant
had been pulling the leg of our worthy slave, by telling
him that these nightly expeditions were for the purpose
of carrying off some ravishingly beautiful lady from one
of the harems. No doubt he thought my sketching
merely a blind. Measurements with a pencil were
obviously part of some incantation.
While on the subject of sketching, especially quick notetaking under difficult conditions, I want a word with my
fellow-craftsmen should they chance to take up this book.
The difficulties of drawing by twilight, lamplight, and the
still greater difficulty of drawing in colour under blazing
sunlight, cannot easily be exaggerated. How many times
has a sketch done in a failing light looked strong in tone,
only to go to pieces when seen under normal conditions ?
How often the sunlight on your paper flatters your colours,
so that you think you are improvising in a most joyous
"By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold.
High-waited gardens, green and old."
1
I
86
way, and when you get home you find nothing but dinginess and mud!
Probably you have thought it out and found some
solution as I did, but in case these difficulties are still
formidable I will tell you of one way to reduce them to
impotence. I take with me, on all occasions where there
is to be great uncertainty of light, some coloured chalks.
About six colours, picked to suit the kind of work attacked ;
either chalk pencils or hard pastilles will give you certain
colour values in whatever light you find yourself, and even
if you can hardly see what you are drawing these must, to
some extent, standardize your values, so that your rough
work can be washed over and brought up to any pitch of
detail subsequently, without danger of the main tones of
your sketch being wrong. The speed with which a sketch
can be carried forward in this way, and the " quality"
obtained by the rapid fusion of the chalk with the colour
wash, are both pleasant surprises when experimenting in
this medium.
Night after night we sallied forth and roamed about
the narrow ways and tortuous turnings of old Baghdad.
The bazaars are mostly covered in with arched masomy,
and the effect is that of a long side aisle in a veiy untidy
and greatly secularized cathedral. From time to time
glimpses of the dark-blue, star-filled sky showed through
openings overhead, and sometimes a quaintly framed view
of a dome or minaret.
On one occasion we embarked in a goufa, and floated
down the rapidly flowing river, keeping close to the left
bank and taking advantage of every eddy and corner
of slack water made by projecting buildings, lest we
should be swept down too far and lose control of our
curious and difficult craft. The level of the water was
far above the usual height and came up to the very
thresholds of these riverside houses. We floated on,
sometimes under the walls of dark gardens, sometimes
getting glimpses of interiors interiors which in this
glamour of night romance suggested something of the
splendour of Baghdad's old glory :
87
"By garden porches on the brim,
The costly doors flung open wide,
Gold glittering through lamplight dim."
We landed by the Maude bridge and explored further
afield, finding " high-walled gardens " where we beheld
"All round about the fragrant marge,
From fluted vase and brazen urn,
In order, Eastern flowers large."
By day, Baghdad is not so impressive. Too much
squalor is apparent. Yet there are quaint street scenes.
Ancient windows, overhanging the street in one
quarter, reminded me strongly of pictures of old London.
The feature that I could not help noticing, not only in
Baghdad but in all Mesopotamia, was the absence of local
colour. It is true that the sun gives a blazing and con
fused suggestion of colour to objects by contrast with
bluish shadows, especially in the evening, but there is
1 I
88
often very little colour in things themselves. The East
is supposed to be full of blazing colour and the North gray
and drab. Yet compare a barge in Rotterdam or Rochester
with one in Baghdad. The former is picked out in green
and gold and glows with rich, red sails, while the latter,
for all its sunshine, is the colour of ashes not a vestige
often of paint or gilding. Some mahailas I found with
traces of rich colouring, blue and yellow (see sketch facing
page 34), but this was exceptional. Perhaps the scarcity
of paint during years of war may have had something to
do with this noticeable absence of colouring in regard to
both houses and boats. In spite of this slovenliness in
detail there is colour and light in all recollections of
Baghdad's dusty streets.
Somehow the discomfort and squalor is soon forgotten
and the romance and picturesqueness of these far-off streets
remains as a very pleasant memory amidst the winter fogs
and coldness of our northern lands.
VII
IN OLD BAGHDAD
i]
ll
[
IN OLD BAGHDAD
BAGHDAD.
I
SUPPOSE there is no city to be found anywhere in
the world that would quite reach the standard of
dazzling splendour of the Baghdad that we conjure
up in our imagination when we think of the City of the
Arabian Nights in the romantic days, so dear to our child
hood, of Haroun-al-Raschid. We expect so much when
we come to the real Baghdad, and we find so little so
little, that is, of the glamour of the East. Few " costly
doors flung open wide," but a great deal of dirt. Few
dark eyes of ravishingly beautiful women peering coyly
92
through lattice windows, but a great deal of sordid
squalor. Few marvellous entertainments where we can
behold the wonderful witchery of Persian dancing girls,
but a theatre, the principal house of amusement in Baghdad
and lo, a man selling onions to the habitues of the stalls !
Of all the deadly dull shows I have ever seen I think
the one I saw at Baghdad furnished about the dullest.
There were two principal dancing girls stars of the
theatrical world of Mesopotamia and a few others forming
a kind of chorus. The orchestra, on the stage, consisted
of a guitar, a sort of dulcimer, and a drum. The musicians
made a most appalling noise and rocked to and fro, as if
in the greatest enjoyment of the thrilling harmonies they
were creating. The stars came on one at a time, the odd
one out meanwhile augmenting the chorus, and sang a
few verses of a song to a tune that can only be described
as a Gregorian chant with squiggly bits thrown in. Of
course I was unable to understand the words, but can bear
witness to the fact that the tune did not vary the whole
evening, and every gesture and attitude of the singer was
exactly the same again and again as she went through the
performance, and the dance which concluded each six or
eight verses was also exactly the same every time. After
this had been going on for about an hour the other girl
came to the footlights. It was natural to expect a change;
but no, she went through it all as if she had most carefully
understudied the part. Neither of these girls was pretty or
in the least attractive to look at. All I could assume, as
IN OLD BAGHDAD
93
A bit of Old Baghdad.
the audience seemed quite satisfied, was that the words
must have been extraordinarily brilliant or that the Bagh
dad public was very easily entertained.
The journey from Basra to Baghdad takes nearly a
week in a " fast" steamer. It can be done, however,
express, by taking the train from Basra to Amara, leaving
Basra about five in the evening and arriving at Amara in
the morning. Then the journey is continued by boat to
.1 i'
94
i
Kut, and thence from Kut in the evening by train, arriving
in Baghdad in the early morning the whole distance
within two days. The railway does not run the whole way.
The journey from Amara to Kut sounds a mere link across
the river, as the full name of Kut is Kut-el-Amara, and
most people naturally suppose Amara is part of Kut. This
is another Amara, however. The Amara from which we
embark for Kut, a day's journey in a fast boat, is a large
camp, and quite a town for Mesopotamia, captured from the
Turks, early in the war, by sheer bluff. The Turkish
commandant surrendered to a naval launch under the
impression that about half the sea-power of the British
Empire lay in the offing. As a matter of fact no other
help of any kind arrived until the next day, and all the
surrendered forces were kept on good behaviour by a
Lieutenant and a marine I think with one revolver
between them.
Kut looks quite an imposing place from across the
river. The sketch at the top of this article shows it when
the water of the Tigris was particularly high. It is drawn
from the site of the famous liquorice factory, which is now
represented by a few mud heaps and one rusted piece of
machinery. The long arcade with brick pillars runs along
the margin of the river, suggestive of some ancient Baby
lonian city from this distance, and is but a sorry enough
place in reality.
Very little of the Baghdad as we know it to-day is old.
By tradition it was founded in 762 A.D., and became the
A
MOONLIGHT FANTASY :
KUT
FROM
THE RUINS OF THE LICQUOKICE FACTORY
IN OLD BAGHDAD
95
renowned capital of the Arab empire. It is said that the
city grew till it covered some 25 square miles, reaching
its high-water mark of splendour and magnificence under
the Sultan Haroun-al-Raschid. The fame of its schools
and learning was world-wide, and Baghdad became to the
East what Rome became in the West.
For some five centuries this pre-eminence continued,
until the Turkish nomadic tribes from Central Asia came
on to the stage. They conquered Persia, Mesopotamia,
and Syria.
The Turks extended their conquests to Egypt, and
Baghdad, now on the decline, kept her head above water
for another century. But Chingiz Khan, the Mongol,
appeared on the scene, and his son and successor, Ogotay,
overran the Caucasus, Hungary, and Poland. Baghdad
was sacked by Hulagu in 1258, and the irrigation works of
Mesopotamia were destroyed.
In spite of her decline and fall Baghdad is still a holy
place to all faithful Mohammedans. It is the Mecca of
the Shiah Mussulmans. Kerbela and Nejef are the great
places of burial for the faithful, and among the common
sights of the plains of Mesopotamia are endless caravans
of corpses from the Persian hills or from the distant north.
The British occupation of Baghdad has been responsible
for one broad street through the city, possible for ordinary
traffic, but most of the bazaars are long covered-in ways,
arched like cloisters and very picturesque at night. There
are some wonderful blues on domes and minarets, but it is
i
!
96
not until you see the golden towers of Khadamain that you
get any glimpse of the splendour of the golden prime of
good Haroun-al-Raschid. Khadamain is a great place of
pilgrimage, and so zealously guarded is the place that it
is said no Christian would ever be allowed to come out of
the great mosque alive. A golden chain hangs across the
entrance. This can be seen in frontispiece sketch of this
book. All good Mussulmans kiss this chain as they enter
the sacred precincts.
From many delightful points of view the gleaming
towers of this place, seen through the palms and reflected
in the flooded lagoons at the margin of the river, do indeed
give us something of the colour and romance that we had
expected to see and yet so rarely find in the sun-baked
lands of Mesopotamia.
VIII
PARADISE LOST
i:
H
'I I
PARADISE LOST
1
" Blossoms and fruit at once of golden hue
Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed."
—Paradise Lest, IV.
statement often made that Mesopotamia is a
vast desert through which run two great rivers,
bare but for the palm trees on their banks and
flat as a pancake, is true as far as it goes. It is possible,
however, to picture a land entirely different from Mesopo
tamia and still stick to this description. I have met count
less men out there who have told me that they had built up
in their minds a wrong conception of the country and a
wrong idea of its character simply by letting their imagina
tion get to work on insufficient data.
1
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To begin with, the word "desert" generally suggests
sand. People who have been to Egypt or seen the Sahara
naturally picture a sandy waste with its accompanying oases,
palms and camels. Mesopotamia, however, is a land of clay,
of mud, uncompromising mud. The Thames and Medway
saltings at high tide, stretching away to infinity in every
direction this is the picture that I carry in my mind of the
riverside country between Basra and Amara. No blue,
limpid waters by Baghdad's shrines of fretted gold, but
pea-soup or cafe au lait. Even the churned foam from a
paddle wheel is cafe au lait with what a blue-jacket con
temptuously referred to as " a little more of the au lait! "
At a distance it can be blue, gloriously blue, by reflection
from the sky, but it will not bear close examination.
The railway skirts the river here, running from Ezra
Tomb to Amara having started from Basra. Amara must
not be confused with Kut-el-Amara. The names are a
source of great confusion to newcomers. When I was
told that the railway did not go any further than Amara, I
lightheartedly pictured myself making my way across the
river in a goufa or bellam and scorned the suggestion that
I might have to wait some time for a steamer to Kut. I
thought Kut was on one side of the river and Amara on
the other. It is, however, a twenty-four hours' journey in a
fast boat.
It is perfectly true that the country is " as flat as a pan
cake " in original formation, but the traces of ancient irriga
tion systems, to say nothing of buried cities Babylon is
:\
T)AWN
AT AMARA
'
<**
PARADISE LOST
101
quite mountainous for Mesopotamia make it a very bumpy
plain in places.
Now that the British are in occupation of the land
instead of the Turk, the natural assumption of every
patriotic Briton is that the desert will immediately blossom
as the rose and the waste places become inhabited. But
the difficulties, which are many finance being, perhaps, the
least of them arise on all sides, when a study of the
subject goes a little deeper than the generalizations popu
larly made about irrigation and its revival in a land which
was once, before all things, dependent for its prosperity upon
this science.
Of the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates,
the banks of the Euphrates are the more wooded and
picturesque and the Tigris is the busier. The backwaters,
creeks and side channels of both are exceedingly beautiful,
and here one can get a glimpse of the fertility that must
have belonged to Mesopotamia when it was a network of
streams and when the forests abounded within its borders.
Centuries of neglect and the blight of the unspeakable Turk
have dealt hardly with this country. It is indeed a Paradise
Lost and it will be many a long day before it is Paradise
Regained.
A beginning, however, has been made. Our army of
occupation includes " irrigation officers," and gradually the
work of watering the country is extending. Hardly any
tree but the palm is found, yet this is only for want of
planting. The soil is good, and with an abundance of
I»
IO2
water, everything, from a field of corn to a forest, is
possible.
I made some study of the irrigation work in progress,
and picked up a little rudimentary information concern
ing this problem of the watering of the land, although I
lay no claim to technical knowledge on the subject. The
chief difficulty does not seem to be that of making the
desert blossom as the rose, but that of causing the waste
places to be inhabited. What the Babylonians with slave
labour could do, modern machinery and science can quite
easily achieve ; but the difficulty of finding sufficient people
to live in this resuscitated Eden will be great. Mesopo
tamia is not a white man's country. India would appear
to be the direction in which to look for colonists, but it is
an unfortunate fact that the Arab does not like the Indian
and the Indian does not like the Arab. Sooner or later
there would be trouble.
In the creeks the water is much clearer than in the river,
as it deposits the silt when it flows more placidly than in
the turmoil of the main stream. Oranges, bananas, lemons,
mulberries abound, and vines trailing from palm to palm
in some of the backwaters. In one narrow arm near
Basra, a sort of communication trench between two canals,
I saw orange bushes overhanging the water, and, growing
with them, some plant with great white bells. I have
sketched the effect on page 98, and incidentally show a
bellam in which an old Arab is pushing his way through
the overhanging shrubs. On page 105 is a goufa,
l
1
A BACKWATER
tN EDEN
PARADISE LOST
103
a type of round wicker boat in vogue two thousand six
hundred years ago and still in use. Talk about standardiza
tion : here is a craft standardized before the days of Sen
nacherib ! Assyrian sculptures in the British Museum show
this boat in use exactly as it is to-day, and although we
have no records, it probably was in use for ages previously.
Noah, possibly, had one as dinghy to the Ark. The goufa
is made like a basket and then coated with bitumen. This
type of boat gives a touch of fantasy to the scenery of the
Tigris and Euphrates, especially when rilled with water
melons and paddled by a man whose appearance suggests
Abraham attempting the r61e of Sinbad the Sailor for " the
pictures."
Of all the things I saw in my travels in Mesopotamia, I
think a goufa was about the most satisfactory. It is a
delightful shape and a fascinating colour a sort of milky
blue-grey somewhere between the colour of an elephant
and an old lead vase. It satisfies that craving for mystery
which we are led to expect when we travel to the East.
When we first see a goufa we do not know quite what it is.
It may be something to do with magic.
Another curiosity of the Upper Tigris is the raft of light
wood and air-inflated skins which comes down from the
north to Samara and Baghdad. On this section of the
river there are many shallows, sometimes caused by traces
of old rubble weirs. Consequently any kind of craft which
drew more than a few inches would be always in trouble.
These rafts, made of light saplings lashed together, are
1
'*ill
rendered bouyant by being packed underneath with goat
skins inflated with air. Thus they require only a very
slight depth of water to float them, and they are sufficiently
tough to stand bumping and scraping over shoals and
shallows.
The men who manoeuvre these strange craft have some
sort of tent or shelter to protect them from the sun, and they
row with huge paddles. This rowing is sufficient to keep
some sort of steering way on the raft, enough to enable it to
get from one bank of the river to the other as it floats down.
Wood is scarce in the Baghdad region, and the material
of these rafts is sold together with the cargo on its arrival
at its destination. The crew proceed back by road to
Diarbekr or some up-river town to bring down another raft.
The glamour of the East is felt mostly in the West.
In an atmosphere of fog and wet streets, sun-baked plains
with endless caravans and belts of date-palms by Tigris'
shore seem the most delightful of prospects. Memory and
imagination, those two artists of never-failing skill, leave
out of the picture all dust and squalor and insects ! Yet
to those who are sojourning by the Waters of Babylon or
resting in sight of the golden towers of Khadamain
romance and mystery would seem to dwell in a glimpse of
Waterloo Bridge, with ghostly barges gliding silently by a
thousand lamps, or in the grey cliffs of houses that make
looming vistas down a London street.
Of all places in the world, Baghdad, the city of Harounal-Raschid, is the one around which cling the romantic
35*
•It!
"High, eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit
Of vegetable gold ; "—Paradise Lost, IV.-
II
.11
ill
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ideas of the enchanted East. For this reason " Chu Chin
Chow" will probably be still running in ten years' time.
It is a play which has become almost a symbol of Eastern
romance. In Mesopotamia I observed that it was a
standard of comparison. "Like 'Chu Chin Chow'" or
"quite the Oscar Asche touch" were expressions frequently
heard among our men who were describing something
picturesque they had seen.
Now I may as well confess before I go any further, that
I have not seen " Chu Chin Chow." I have never been
able to get in. During the war, leave in London was an
opportunist affair, with no notice in advance to allow for
advance booking, and so I never succeeded in my quest of
the glamour of the East on the stage. But war, which
brought with it so many disadvantages brought also many
opportunities. Although I was unable to get into His
Majesty's Theatre, I succeeded in getting into Baghdad.
I found streets through which beggars and British
officers, camels and Ford cars jostled each other, often in
vain attempts to get on. You can imagine the state of
things on a busy morning. By day there is so much more
rubbish and dirt to take the romance away from the pictu
resque, but at night, especially by moonlight, the quaint
streets of old Baghdad do give an element of mystery and
adventure that the Arabian Nights and the stage lead us to
expect.
I came upon a wonderful group of buildings by the
banks of the Tigris. It appears to have been a disused
PUFFING BILLY
ON THE TIGRIS
PARADISE LOST
107
mosque. The minarets are shorn of their tops, and look
like huge candlesticks. A dark passage, vaulted like the
aisle of a cathedral, led down to covered bazaars.
Again, at Basra, the House of Sinbad in Ashar Creek
has quite the effect of a wonderfully staged production.
The huge, high-prowed mahailas, the crazy wooden
galleries skirting the river, the quaint, squat minaret
appearing over the flat roofs, and the dim light of lamps
reflected in the still water made a picture at twilight that it
would be difficult to beat for mystery and romance. A
man in black with a fire of brushwood in the bow of a
mahaila added a touch of magic to the scene.
I don't know in the least what he was doing with this
pillar of fire, but it was extraordinarily effective, and it
made you feel you were getting your money's worth out of
the show.
Or, again, for mystery and romance, here is another
scene on the Tigris between Amara and Kut.
The evening is still. No breeze stirs the sliding
surface of the river. On every side immeasurable plains
stretch from horizon to horizon, " dim tracts and vast, robed
in the lustrous gloom of leaden-coloured even," save where
the misty blue ridge of the Persian mountains links heaven
to earth, gleaming with a ghostly chain of snow beneath
a rose-flushed sky. A few marsh Arabs' reed huts and a
distant fire are the only signs that the world is inhabited.
A faint rhythmical beating is growing more distinct, the
herald of the slow progress of an up-coming steamer.
io8
Before night is fallen she has passed a strange object
with high funnel and clattering stern paddle, an apparition
it would seem from our Western world of a hundred years
ago, moving slowly across the crowded stage of modern
war's necessities. I observed her number was S 31, but I
believe she is known by her intimate friends as " Puffing
Billy."
:
IX
THE DESERT OF THE
FLAMING SWORD
*
! !
Jl
S
INCE I have returned to England I constantly run
up against people who ask me, sometimes jokingly
and sometimes almost seriously, if I have brought
back any sketches of the Garden of Eden, and a conversa
tion invariably follows as to the authenticity or otherwise
of the traditional site. Is it true that Mesopotamia was
the cradle of the human race, and, if so, are the descrip
tions in the book of Genesis concerning the world known
ii2
to Adam and Noah, however figuratively they may be
taken, in keeping with the natural conditions of such a
land? However much Paradise may have been lost, can
the traveller see in Mesopotamia any signs of beauty and
richness of verdure out of which the artist and the poet
could visualize a garden of the Lord ?
The answer, as they say in Parliament, where no one
could be expected to give a downright and straightforward
" yes " or " no," is in the affirmative. The scenes of these
early dramas are characteristically Mesopotamian. The
well-ordered garden "planted" with the tree of life "in
the midst," and a river to water it, the ark of Noah pitched
" within and without with pitch " as the ancient goufa is
still pitched, the Tower of Babel, built with brick instead
of stone and with slime (i.e. bitumen) for mortar all these
things belong to the flat, sunbaked lands of this alluvial
plain. At Kurna, Arab tradition has placed Eve's Tree.
It is a sorry looking, scraggy thing. It does not seem
good for food, nor is it pleasant for the eyes and a tree
to be desired. Another traditional Garden of Eden is at
Amara, and the Eden of the Sumerian version of the story
is thought by Sir William Willcocks to have been on the
Euphrates between Anah and Hit.
The " planting" of the garden and certain details
brought out in the short description of its features suggest
very strongly the things that would occur to the mind
of a writer living in an irrigated country. Milton's
gorgeous backgrounds are almost entirely northern. He
II
ON '1HE
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113
has striven to give it an eastern touch here and there, but
such stage management consists chiefly in bringing in a
few palms from the greenhouse. His description "of a
steep wilderness, whose hairy sides with thicket overgrown,
grotesque and wild," and " of that steep savage hill," are
entirely northern in feeling. The same northern wildness
pervades the garden. Note the " flowers worthy of
Paradise, which not nice Art in beds and curious knots,
but Nature boon poured forth profuse on hill and dale
and plain." In irrigation lands like Mesopotamia it is the
combination of great heat and abundant water that makes
for luxuriant growth. Milton conceives the most romantic
and wild scenery on hill and dale and savage defile,
suddenly brought into order for the use of man. The
Bible story speaks only of features to be found in a land
like Babylonia. Sir William Willcocks thinks that the
word translated " mist" would probably be better rendered
" inundation," and that the writer is speaking of a country
where inundation rather than rainfall was the support
of life to the vegetable world. Genesis ii. 5 and 6 would
then read:
" For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the
earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
" But there went up an inundation from the earth, and
watered the whole face of the ground."
The description of the planting of the garden is very
suggestive of a tract of bare land to which irrigation has
been brought. " And out of the ground made the Lord
T
ii4
God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight." The
garden, too, is watered, not by rainfall, but by a river
which parts into different heads, as do the Tigris and
Euphrates when they spread out upon the flat alluvial land
below Baghdad.
Compare the " scenery " in St. John's Revelation with
that of the writer of Genesis when the kings of the earth
and the great men sought to hide from the wrath of God.
They "hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks
of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks,
Fall on us and hide us."
Adam and Eve could hide themselves only " amongst
the trees " of the garden.
The story of Noah and the flood has a very close
parallel in a record of Berosus, the Babylonian priest.
Xisuthros had a dream in which the deity announced
to him that on a certain day all men should perish in a
deluge of water, and ordered him to take all the sacred
writings and bury them at Sippar, the City of the Sun,
then to build a ship, provide it with ample stores of food
and drink and enter it with his family and his dearest
friends, also animals, both birds and quadrupeds of every
kind. Xisuthros did as he had been bidden. When the
flood began to abate, on the third day after the rain had
ceased to fall, he sent out some birds to see whether they
would find any land, but the birds, having found neither
food nor place to rest upon, returned to the ship. A few
days later Xisuthros once more sent the birds out; but
1
SHEIK SAAD AND THE
PERSIAN MOUNTAINS
115
they again came back to him, this time with muddy feet.
On being sent out again a third time they did not return
at all. Xisuthros then knew that the land was uncovered,
made an opening in the roof of the ship, and saw that it
was stranded on the top of a mountain. He came out
of the ship with his wife, daughter, and pilot, built an
altar, and sacrificed to the gods, after which he disappeared
together with them. When his companions came out to
seek him they did not see him, but a voice from Heaven
informed them that he had been translated among the gods
to live for ever, as a reward for his piety and righteousness.
The voice went on to command the survivors to return to
Babylonia, unearth the sacred writings, and make them
known to men. They obeyed, and, moreover, built many
cities and restored Babylon.*
An eminent authority on the history of Mesopotamia
told me that he considered the deluge to have been a purely
local catastrophe in the flat land of Babylonia. The
Arabs use the same word alternately for mountain or
desert. If such a use has come down from long ago the
extraordinary statements in Genesis vii. 20: " Fifteen
cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains
were covered," may be easily reconciled. It has always
seemed to me that mountains which were covered by 24
feet of water must have looked very insignificant even in
the flat land of Chaldea. If, however, the word " desert "
will serve equally well for the word " mountain " we have
* From Ragozin's Chaldea.
.
ii6
an account of a flood that could easily destroy the " world "
of Mesopotamia. The annual flood from which the
nomadic inhabitants were used to escaping (as they do
now by moving up to the higher ground) became a wide
spread inundation till the highest " desert" was covered
and the population drowned.
The Biblical account of the Ark suggests to any dweller
in Mesopotamia that it was a gigantic mahaila. The
pitching inside and out is still practised in putting together
some of the Euphrates boats, and the method of making
a goufa, covering it on both sides with bitumen, has a
strong family likeness to the method of boat-building used
in those primitive times.
The Jew, however, was always a typical landlubber,
and one would expect a specification for the building of a
ship would lack nautical details. Not so, however, the
Assyrian tablet relating to the Ark. It was, we are told,
a true ship. It was decked in. It was well caulked in
all its seams. It was handed over to a pilot. It was
navigated in proper style. " I steered about the sea.
The corpses drifted about like logs. I opened a port
hole. ... I steered over countries which were now a
terrible sea." The pilot made the land at Nizir and let her
go aground.
Near Ezra's Tomb on the Tigris I saw a boat very
much like Noah's ark of the toy shop, and made a scribbled
sketch of it, which is reproduced on page 36.
Beside the fertile tract of country above Hit on the
,1
HIT,
KNOWN TO THE ARAIk>
AS "THE MOUTH OF HELI.
I..
•its
J
117
Euphrates a land which has been identified as the
Sumerian Garden of Eden stretches a wild and desolate
region, a place of bitumen and smoke of incrusted salt and
sulphur, of rock and fiery heat known to the Arabs as the
Mouth of Hell. It guards the garden from approach by
the nature of its inhospitable ground, and so I have called
it, this burning wilderness, the Desert of the Flaming
Sword. The town of Hit, evil smelling and grim, stands
sentinel between the fertile river-bank and the ever-smoking
plain.
We reached this region in a car from Felujeh, travelling
through Dhibban, where we crossed the Euphrates by a
bridge of boats and on to Rhamadie. Thence the track
is a rough one through desert country, undulating in
places and becoming rougher. Some ridges of barren hill
cut off the view from time to time as we approach Hit,
and we surmount one of these, obtaining a goodly
prospect of the river, to plunge down again into a wilder
ness glittering with crystals. At first sight we might be
entering the valley of diamonds of the Arabian Nights,
but, alas, a close inspection shows the glittering objects
to be merely pieces of rock, a sort of white marble.
Then we come to mounds of curious pale earth and
ground yellow with sulphur, and then, far descried
beneath its black coils of smoke, the walls of Hit.
The car was boiling by this time, and owing to some
breakage we had to stop, as we drew close to the town.
We left the driver, however, to tinker about with the old
if,
1
ii8
Ford, and plunged into the wilds, Brown being particularly
anxious to see what all the smoke was about.
The sun heat was still intense, and it was difficult
to tell the real size of anything owing to the mirage.
A sort of temple seemed to detach itself from the ground,
and it was apparently floating about in an ever-changing
lake. Little black men were stoking a furnace, and a
river of some black substance, well banked up with earth,
was flowing at our feet. I think I have seldom seen so
weird a sight.
The ground is full of bitumen, and to make lime the
Arabs stack up alternate stones and blocks of bitumen,
setting fire to the pile. The effect of these kilns with
their great columns of heavy, black smoke, writhing and
coiling up into the still sky, was indescribable.
The shadow of coming night crept across the desert,
turning the gold and purple of the ground to the colour
of ashes. The high walls of the town still caught the
sunset and glowed dull red against the darkening sky.
A fringe of palms, beyond, showed where the river flowed,
the river that watered the garden where the land was green
and good. But the grim ramparts of Hit stretched like
a line of fire between, forbidding and impassable. Higher
and higher the shadows climbed till the tall minaret
stood out alone, a sentinel and a flaming sword. A
hundred sooty figures toiled and grovelled in the ground.
In the sweat of their faces shall they eat bread.
X
fl
future of Mesopotamia with its enormous
productive potentialities is a subject fraught
with great interest to all those who have studied
her past. Will this country again become one of the
granaries of the world, and will it ever be, like Egypt, an
important asset of our Empire ? At first, when the war had
freed the country from the Turkish yoke, it was assumed
that it would rise into unheard-of prosperity under the
fatherly care of British protection. Schemes of irrigation,
long planned and to some small extent begun, even under
the Turkish regime, were to re-stock Eden and benefit the
whole world. The Baghdad railway would bring the wares
1
Hit
122
of the East quickly to our doors, and it had even been
anticipated that Nineveh would become as much a resort
for European tourists as Rome.
All this, however, was foretold in the time when a new
world was expected as soon as hostilities ceased. Another
tune has been called now, and we find countless advocates
of the policy to get out of Mesopotamia altogether and let
well alone. Capitalization, like charity, we are told must
begin at home, and thirty millions, estimated by the
Inspector of Irrigation in Egypt, as necessary to turn
Mesopotamia into a prosperous country with an annual
revenue in fifty years time of ten millions a year, should
be used for house building in England and not for empire
building in Chaldea. On the other hand, wise men have
told us that the Mesopotamian oilfields near Mosul are to
be of great importance, like the Persian wells that have their
pipe-line outfall at Abadan, and that a firm and fatherly
hand is necessary to keep the country in a state of trade
development. Should our sphere of influence be withdrawn
from Mesopotamia things will revert back to chaos. Already
trouble with the various tribes is brewing.
Not the least of the problems in controlling the
marauding activities of some of the nomadic tribes is the
difficulty of meting out adequate punishment to peacebreakers. The fact that all the stock-in-trade of a township
amounts to a few pots and pans and house material of cane
matting and mud makes it impossible to impress them by
destroying their houses. In a few days everything would
\!
II
A BRITISH CRUISER IN
THE PERSIAN GULF
I
123
be rebuilt as before. It could often happen that the
punitive expedition arrived to find the town moved to some
district not mentioned in the orders for the day.
Mesopotamia under the Turks was in some ways worse
off than others of his badly governed possessions. The
officials who were sent from Constantinople into various
provinces regarded the job as a poor one, as far as the
amenities of life were concerned, and one to be endured
while making as big a pile as possible from the grounddown natives. I should imagine that one of these officials
would be about as popular with the landowners as a
publican was among the Jews.
An ancient prophecy foretells that the great river
Euphrates shall be dried up that the way of the kings of
the East shall be prepared. The time has come, if the
war was indeed Armageddon. German engineers in 1914
had made a highway and effectively " dried up " the waters
of the river for the passage of the armies. They themselves
expected to be kings of the East although coming from
the West, and some, it is interesting to note, explain the
Prussians as of Oriental origin. At the same time the
claims both of oil and empire kept us busy in the Persian
Gulf. It looked as if we were to share this new kingdom
or sphere of influence with Germany, until the war came
and sorted things out.
There are some who see in vast irrigation schemes a
"drying up" of the Euphrates that shall bring colonists
from the Far East so that the denizens of China or Japan
I
124
shall begin, like the Saxons in Kent, to get a footing in the
country and become, in very substance, the Yellow Peril.
He is a rash man who would prophesy concerning the
future of Mesopotamia as far as our empire is concerned.
Perhaps before these pages are in print something decisive
will have occurred. We read daily in our newspapers of
rumours of war with restless tribes around Mosul, and of
raids and skirmishes.
The land of Shinar, where Abraham dwelt, with its silent
traces of the great civilizations which it fostered, Babylonian
and Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Arabian, is once more, by
the chances of war, an open book, and time alone will show
what is to be written therein.
THE END
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
ADVENTURES
WITH A SKETCH BOOK
With numerous Illustrations in colour and black and white by the Author.
Crown 410. 12/6 net.
" Artistically, and from the literary point of view, it is one of the most
delectable travel books that have been published for many a long day, for
Mr. Maxwell has not only an eye for the picturesque, and a frank, clear style
both of pen and brush, but he has the even rarer gift of finding old-world
romance and adventure in places near at hand where their presence would never
be suspected by the ordinary traveller. . . . Mr. Maxwell's book is wholly free
from any suspicion of guide-book padding, and is as interesting and exciting to
read as a work of romantic fiction. The chief feature which should ensure it a
permanent position on the library shelf are the very vital and expressive
illustrations, the very spacing of which on the printed page is delight to the
eye." Observer.
" There is certainly no lack of vitality in Mr. Maxwell's sketches, and his
adroit economic draughtsmanship, his keen observation, and the feeling of
personal interpretation in his work give them genuine distinction." Sunday Times.
" Mr. Maxwell is a most original traveller. . . . We have said so much of
Mr. Maxwell the writer and traveller, that there is a danger of forgetting Mr.
Maxwell the artist. All the work has character; most of it has that delicacy of
colour and outline which we have learned to associate with the author."
AtftencBum.
" On page after page Mr. Maxwell delights the eye with views and ' bits'
picturesque, quaint or amusing, while his anecdotes and adventures make us
laugh and long to follow in his footsteps, for he has the gift of description in
words as well as in pictures. This is one of the most thoroughly satisfactory
artist-tourist books we have seen, and its publisher has done justice to the good
material at his disposal." Morning Post.
" A delightful survey of scenes. Mr. Maxwell's drawings are full of the right
touch and insight, all faithfully conveyed and put into a sumptuous book." Pall
Matt Gazette.
" This is an exceedingly charming book, Mr. Maxwell's book is a genuine
sketch book." Daily News.
" Contains many clever drawings. . . . Charmingly sketched." Evening
Standard.
JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO ST., W.T.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
THE LAST CRUSADE
1914-1918
With 100 Sketches in Colour, Monochrome, and Line made by the
Author in the autumn and winter of 1918, when sent on duty to Palestine
by the Admiralty for the Imperial War Museum. Crown 4to,
£i 53. net.
" Exceedingly interesting. . . . The letterpress is full of vitality and
humour ; the reader is irresistibly carried on from one incident to another
without a dull moment." Sattirday Review.
" A very handsome book. It makes good reading, and a still better
' picture book,' and it is a valuable addition to the vast literature of the
war." Westminster Gazette.
" Full of good matter. The pictures are finely done, and neither the
colour nor the black and white reproductions leave anything to be desired.
It is indeed one of the best war books published." Outlook.
" A very handsome souvenir of the Last Crusade." Pall Matt Gazette.
" Mr. Maxwell has made a most delightful album of scenes in the
Holy Land." Globe.
" A very beautiful and inspiring book." Graphic.
" Mr. Maxwell's book is an exceedingly entertaining one both to read
and look at."—Field.
" Mr. Maxwell's sketches are extremely good and vivid, and the text
is lively and readable." Land and Water.
"The drawings possess great artistic merit. One of the most
attractive books which the war has yet evoked." Connoisseur.
JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO ST., W.i.
I

A DWELLER IN MESOPOTAMIA

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